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THE RETURN 
OF THE SOLDIER 



BY 

REBECCA WEST 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 

BY NORMAN PRICE 




NEW YORK 
THE CENTURY CO. 

1918 






Copyright, 1918, by 
The Century Co. 



Published, March, 1918 



\m -3 1918 

©Ci.A481995 



Av I 




He lay there in the confiding relaxation of a child 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



He lay there in the confiding relaxation of 
a child Frontispiece 

FACING 
PAGE 

"Give it a brush now and then, like a good 

soul" 6 

She would get into the four-foot punt that 
was used as a ferry and bring it over very 
slowly .66 

''I ought n't to do it, ought I?" . . . . 176 



THE RETURN 
OF THE SOLDIER 



THE RETURN 
OF THE SOLDIER 

CHAPTER I 

AH, don't begin to fuss!'' wailed Kitty. 
* * If a woman began to worry in these 
days because her husband hadn't writ- 
ten to her for a fortnight! Besides, if 
he 'd been anywhere interesting, anywhere 
where the fighting was really hot, he 'd 
have found some way of telling me instead 
of just leaving it as * Somewhere in 
France. ' He '11 be all right. ' ' 

We were sitting in the nursery. I had 
not meant to enter it again, now that the 
child was dead; but I had come suddenly 
on Kitty as she slipped the key into the 
lock, and I had lingered to look in at the 
high room, so full of whiteness and clear 

3 



4 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

colors, so unendurably gay and familiar, 
which is kept in all respects as though 
there were still a child in the house. It 
was the first lavish day of spring, and the 
sunlight was pouring through the tall, 
arched windows and the flowered curtains 
so brightly that in the old days a fat fist 
would certainly have been raised to point 
out the new, translucent glories of the 
rosebud. Sunlight was lying in great pools 
on the blue cork floor and the soft rugs, 
patterned with strange beasts, and threw 
dancing beams, which should have been 
gravely watched for hours, on the white 
paint and the blue distempered walls. It 
fell on the rocking-horse, which had been 
Chris's idea of an appropriate present for 
his year-old son, and showed what a fine 
fellow he was and how tremendously 
dappled; it picked out Mary and her little 
lamb on the chintz ottoman. And along 
the mantelpiece, under the loved print of 
the snarling tiger, in attitudes that were 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 5 

at once angular and relaxed, as though 
they were ready for play at their master's 
pleasure, but found it hard to keep from 
drowsing in this warm weather, sat the 
Teddy Bear and the chimpanzee and the 
woolly white dog and the black cat with 
eyes that roll. Everything was there ex- 
cept Oliver. I turned away so that I 
might not spy on Kitty revisiting her 
dead. But she called after me : 

*^Come here, Jenny. I 'm going to dry 
my hair.'' And when I looked again I 
saw that her golden hair was all about her 
shoulders and that she wore over her 
frock a little silken jacket trimmed with 
rosebuds. She looked so like a girl on a 
magazine cover that one expected to find 
a large *^15 cents" somewhere attached 
to her person. She had taken Nanny's 
big basket-chair from its place by the high- 
chair, and was pushing it over to the 
middle window. **I always come in here 
when Emery has washed my hair. It 's 



6 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

the sunniest room in the house. I wish 
Chris wouldn't have it kept as a nursery 
when there 's no chance — " She sat 
down, swept her hair over the back of the 
chair into the sunlight, and held out to 
me her tortoiseshell hair-brush. **Give it 
a brush now and then, like a good soul ; but 
be careful. Tortoise snaps so!" 

I took the brush and turned to the win- 
dow, leaning my forehead against the glass 
and staring unobservantly at the view. 
I You probably know the beauty of that 
view ; for when Chris rebuilt Baldry Court 
after his marriage he handed it over to 
architects who had not so much the wild 
eye of the artist as the knowing wink 
of the manicurist, and between them they 
massaged the dear old place into matter 
for innumerable photographs in the illus- 
trated papers. The house lies on the crest 
of Harrowweald, and from its windows 
the eye drops to miles of emerald pasture- 
land lying wet and brilliant under a west- 




'Give it a brush now and then, like a good soul" 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 7 

ward line of sleek hills, blue with distance 
and distant woods, while nearer it range 
the suave decorum of the lawn and the 
Lebanon cedar, the branches of which are 
like darkness made palpable, and the min- 
atory gauntnesses of the topmost pines 
in the wood that breaks downward, its 
bare boughs a close texture of browns and 
purples, from the pond on the edge of 
the hill. 

That day its beauty was an affront to 
me, because, like most Englishwomen of 
my time, I was wishing for the return of 
a soldier. Disregarding the national in- 
terest and everything else except the keen 
prehensile gesture of our hearts toward 
him, I wanted to snatch my Cousin Chris- 
topher from the wars and seal him in this 
green pleasantness his wife and I now 
looked upon. Of late I had had bad 
dreams about him. By nights I saw Chris 
running across the brown rottenness of 
No-Man 's-Land, starting back here because 



8 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

he trod upon a hand, not even looking there 
because of the awfulness of an unburied 
head, and not till my dream was packed 
full of horror did I see him pitch forward 
on his knees as he reached safety, if it was 
that. For on the war-films I have seen 
men slip down as softly from the trench- 
parapet, and none but the grimmer phil- 
osophers could say that they had reached 
safety by their fall. And when I escaped 
into wakefulness it was only to lie stiff 
and think of stories I had heard in the boy- 
ish voice of the modern subaltern, which 
rings indomitable, yet has most of its gay 
notes flattened: **We were all of us in a 
barn one night, and a shell came along. 
My pal sang out, * Help me, old man ; I Ve 
got no legs !' and I had to answer, *I can't, 
old man ; I 've got no hands ! ' " Well, 
such are the dreams of English-women 
to-day. I could not complain, but I 
wished for the return of our soldier. So 
I said : 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 9 

**I wish we could hear from Chris. It 
is a fortnight since he wrote." 

And then it was that Kitty wailed, * * Ah, 
don't begin to fuss!'' and bent over her 
image in a hand-mirror as one might bend 
for refreshment over scented flowers. 

I tried to build about me such a little 
globe of ease as always ensphered her, and 
thought of all that remained good in our 
lives though Chris was gone. I was sure 
that we were preserved from the reproach 
of luxury, because we had made a fine 
place for Chris, one little part of the world 
that was, so far as surfaces could make it 
so, good enough for his amazing goodness. 
Here we had nourished that surpassing 
amiability which was so habitual that one 
took it as one of his physical character- 
istics, and regarded any lapse into bad 
temper as a calamity as startling as the 
breaking of a leg; here we had made hap- 
piness inevitable for him. I could shut 
my eyes and think of innumerable proofs 



10 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

of how well we had succeeded, for there 
never was so visibly contented a man. 
And I recalled all that he did one morning 
just a year ago when he went to the front. 

First he had sat in the morning-room 
and talked and stared out on the lawns 
that already had the desolation of an 
empty stage, although he had not yet 
gone; then broke off suddenly and went 
about the house, looking into many rooms. 
He went to the stables and looked at the 
horses and had the dogs brought out; he 
refrained from touching them or speaking 
to them, as though he felt himself already 
infected with the squalor of war and did 
not want to contaminate their bright 
physical well-being. Then he went to 
the edge of the wood and stood staring 
down into the clumps of dark-leaved 
rhododendrons and the yellow tangle of 
last year's bracken and the cold winter 
black of the trees. (From this very win- 
dow I had spied on him.) Then he moved 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 11 

broodingly back to the house to be with 
his wife until the moment of his going, 
when Kitty and I stood on the steps to see 
him motor off to Waterloo. He kissed us 
both. As he bent over me I noticed once 
again how his hair was of two colors, 
brown and gold. Then he got into the car, 
put on his Tommy air, and said: *^So 
long! I '11 write you from Berlin!'' and 
as he spoke his head dropped back, and 
he set a hard stare on the house. That 
meant, I knew, that he loved the life he 
had lived with us and desired to carry 
with him to the dreary place of death and 
dirt the complete memory of everything 
about his home, on which his mind could 
brush when things were at their worst, as 
a man might finger an amulet through 
his shirt. This house, this life with us, 
was the core of his heart. 

**If he could come back!" I said. **He 
was so happy here!" 

And Kitty answered; 



12 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

**He could not have been happier." 
It was important that he should have 
been happy, for, you see, he was not like 
other city men. When we had played 
together as children in that wood he had 
always shown great faith in the imminence 
of the improbable. He thought that the 
birch-tree would really stir and shrink 
and quicken into an enchanted princess, 
that he really was a red Indian, and that 
his disguise would suddenly fall from him 
at the right sundown, that at any moment 
a tiger might lift red fangs through the 
bracken, and he expected these things with 
a stronger motion of the imagination than 
the ordinary child's make-believe. And 
from a thousand intimations, from his 
occasional clear fixity of gaze on good 
things as though they were about to dis- 
solve into better, from the passionate an- 
ticipation with which he went to new coun- 
tries or met new people, I was aware that 
this faith had persisted into his adult life. 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 13 

He had exchanged his expectation of be- 
coming a red Indian for the equally wist- 
ful aspiration of becoming completely rec- 
onciled to life. It was his hopeless hope 
that some time he would have an expe- 
rience that would act on his life like 
alchemy, turning to gold all the dark 
metals of events, and from that revela- 
tion he would go on his way rich with an 
inextinguishable joy. There had been, of 
course, no chance of his ever getting it. 
Literally there wasn't room to swing a 
revelation in his crowded life. First of 
all, at his father's death he had been 
obliged to take over a business that was 
weighted by the needs of a mob of female 
relatives who were all useless either in the 
old way, with antimacassars, or in the 
new way, with gold-clubs ; then Kitty had 
come along and picked up his conception 
of normal expenditure, and carelessly 
stretched it as a woman stretches a new 
glove on her hand. Then there had been 



U THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

the difficult task of learning to live after 
the death of his little son. It had lain on 
us, the responsibility, which gave us dig- 
nity, to compensate him for his lack of 
free adventure by arranging him a gra- 
cious life. B^t now, just because our per- 
formance had been so brilliantly adequate, 
how dreary was the empty stage ! 

We were not, perhaps, specially con- 
temptible women, because nothing could 
ever really become a part of our life until 
it had been referred to Chris's attention. 
I remember thinking, as the parlor-maid 
came in with a card on the tray, how little 
it mattered who had called and what flag 
of prettiness or wit she flew, since there 
was no chance that Chris would come in 
and stand over her, his fairness red in the 
firelight, and show her that detached at- 
tention, such as an unmusical man pays to 
good music, which men of anchored affec- 
tions give to attractive women. 
Kitty read from the card: 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 15 

** 'Mrs. William Grey, Mariposa, Lady- 
smith Road, Wealdstone,' I don't know 
anybody in Wealdstone/' That is the 
name of the red suburban stain which fouls 
the fields three miles nearer London than 
Harrowweald. One cannot now protect 
one's environment as one once could. 
**Do I know her, Ward! Has she been 
here before? 

*'0h, no, ma'am." The parlor-maid 
smiled superciliously. **She said she had 
news for you." From her tone one could 
deduce an over-confiding explanation made 
by a shabby visitor while using the door- 
mat almost too zealously. 

Kitty pondered, then said: 

**I 'U come down." As the girl went, 
Kitty took up the amber hair-pins from 
her lap and began swathing her hair about 
her head. ^ * Last year 's fashion, ' ' she com- 
mented; *'but I fancy it '11 do for a per- 
son with that sort of address." She stood 
up, and threw her little silk dressing- 



16 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

jacket over the rocking-horse. **I 'm see- 
ing her because she may need something, 
and I specially want to be kind to people 
while Chris is away. One wants to de- 
serve well of heaven.'' For a minute she 
was aloof in radiance, but as we linked 
arms and went out into the corridor she 
became more mortal, with a pout. **The 
people that come breaking into one's nice, 
quiet day ! ' ' she moaned reproachfully, and 
as we came to the head of the broad stair- 
case she leaned over the white balustrade 
to peer down on the hall, and squeezed my 
arm. *^Look!" she whispered. 

Just beneath us, in one of Kitty's pret- 
tiest chintz arm-chairs, sat a middle-aged 
woman. She wore a yellowish raincoat 
and a black hat with plumes. The sticky 
straw hat had only lately been renovated 
by something out of a little bottle bought 
at the chemist's. She had rolled her black 
thread gloves into a ball on her lap, so that 
she could turn her gray alpaca skirt well 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 17 

above lier muddy boots and adjust its 
brusli-braid with a seamed red hand that 
looked even more worn when she presently 
raised it to touch the glistening flowers of 
the pink azalea that stood on a table beside 
her. Kitty shivered, then muttered: 

*'Let 's get this over, and ran down the 
stairs. On the last step she paused and 
said with conscientious sweetness, **Mrs. 
Grey!'' 

' * Yes, ' ' answered the visitor. She lifted 
to Kitty a sallow and relaxed face the 
expression of which gave me a sharp, pity- 
ing pang of prepossession in her favor : it 
was beautiful that so plain a woman should 
so ardently rejoice in another's loveliness. 
**Are you Mrs. Baldry!" she asked, al- 
most as if she were glad about it, and 
stood up. The bones of her bad stays 
clicked as she moved. Well, she was not 
so bad. Her body was long and round 
and shapely, and with a noble squareness 
of the shoulders ; her fair hair curled diffi- 



18 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

dently about a good brow; her gray eyes, 
though they were remote, as if anything 
worth looking at in her life had kept a 
long way off, were full of tenderness ; and 
though she was slender, there was some- 
thing about her of the wholesome, endear- 
ing heaviness of the ox or the trusted big 
dog. Yet she was bad enough. She was 
repulsively furred with neglect and pov- 
erty, as even a good glove that has dropped 
down behind a bed in a hotel and has lain 
undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive 
when the chambermaid retrieves it from 
the dust and fluff. 

She flung at us as we sat down : 

**My general maid is sister to your sec- 
ond housemaid. '' 

It left us at a loss. 

**You Ve come about a reference!" 
asked Kitty. 

**0h, no. I 've had Gladys two years 
now, and I Ve always found her a very 
good girl. I want no reference.'' With 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 19 

her finger-nail she followed the burst 
seam of the dark pigskin purse that slid 
about on her shiny alpaca lap. * * But girls 
talk, you know. You mustn't blame 
them.'' She seemed to be caught in a 
thicket of embarrassment, and sat staring 
up at the azalea. 

With the hardness of a woman who sees 
before her the curse of women's lives, a 
domestic row, Kitty said that she took no 
interest in servants' gossip. 

**0h, it isn't — " her eyes brimmed as 
though we had been unkind — ** servants' 
gossip that I wanted to talk about. I 
only mentioned Gladys" — she continued 
to trace the burst seam of her purse — ** be- 
cause that 's how I heard you did n 't 
know." 

*^What don't I know?" 

Her head drooped a little. 

** About Mr. Baldry. Forgive me, I 
don't know his rank." 

* ^ Captain Baldry, ' ' supplied Kitty, won- 



20 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

deringly. **Wliat is it that I don't 
knowT' 

She looked far away from us, to the open 
door and its view of dark pines and pale 
March sunshine, and appeared to swallow 
something. 

^^Why, that he 's hurt," she gently said. 

^^ Wounded, you meanT' asked Kitty. 

Her rusty plumes oscillated as she 
moved her mild face about with an air of 
perplexity. 

**Yes," she said, **he 's wounded." 

Kitty's bright eyes met mine, and we 
obeyed that mysterious human impulse to 
smile triumphantly at the spectacle of a 
fellow-creature occupied in baseness. For 
this news was not true. It could not pos- 
sibly be true. The War Office would have 
wired to us immediately if Chris had been 
wounded. This was such a fraud as one 
sees recorded in the papers that meticu- 
lously record squalor in paragraphs 
headed, ^* Heartless Fraud on Soldier's 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 21 

Wife." Presently she would say that she 
had gone to some expense to come here 
with her news and that she was poor, and 
at the first generous look on our faces 
there would come some tale of trouble that 
would disgust the imagination by pictures 
of yellow-wood furniture that a landlord 
oddly desired to seize and a pallid child 
with bandages round its throat. I cast 
down my eyes and shivered at the horror. 
Yet there was something about the phys- 
ical quality of the woman, unlovely though 
she was, which preserved the occasion 
from utter baseness. I felt sure that had 
it not been for the tyrannous emptiness of 
that evil, shiny pigskin purse that jerked 
about on her trembling knees the poor 
driven creature would have chosen 
ways of candor and gentleness. It was, 
strangely enough, only when I looked at 
Kitty and marked how her brightly colored 
prettiness arched over this plain criminal 
as though she were a splendid bird of prey 



22 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

and this her sluggish insect food that I 
felt the moment degrading. 

Kitty was, I felt, being a little too clever 
over it. 

**How is he wounded T' she asked. 

The caller traced a pattern on the carpet 
with her blunt toe. 

**1 don't know how to put it: he 's not 
exactly wounded. A shell burst — '' 

*^ Concussion I" suggested Kitty 

She answered with an odd glibness and 
humility, as though tendering us a term 
she had long brooded over without arriv- 
ing at comprehension, and hoping that our 
superior intelligences would make some- 
thing of it: 

** Shell-shock. " Our faces did not il- 
lumine, so she dragged on lamely, ** Any- 
way, he 's not well." Again she played 
with her purse. Her face was visibly 
damp. 

' ' Not well ? Is he dangerously ill r ' 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 23 

**0h, no." She was too kind to harrow 
us. **Not dangerously ill." 

Kitty brutally permitted a silence to 
fall. Our caller could not bear it, and 
broke it in a voice that nervousness had 
turned to a funny, diffident croak. 

**He 's in the Queen Mary Hospital at 
Boulogne." We did not speak, and she 
began to flush and wriggle on her seat, 
and stooped forward to fumble under the 
legs of her chair for her umbrella. The 
sight of its green seams and unveracious 
tortoiseshell handle disgusted Kitty into 
speech. 

^^How do you know all this?" 

Our visitor met her eyes. This was 
evidently a moment for which she had 
steeled herself, and she rose to it with a 
catch of her breath. *^A man who used 
to be a clerk along with my husband is 
in Mr. Baldry's regiment." Her voice 
croaked even more piteously, and her eyes 



24 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

begged: ** Leave it at that! Leave it at 
that! If you only knew — *' 

**And what regiment is that?" pursued 
Kitty. 

The poor sallow face shone with sweat. 

**I never thought to ask," she said. 

**Well, your friend's name — " 

Mrs. Grey moved on her seat so sud- 
denly and violently that the pigskin purse 
fell from her lap and lay at my feet. I 
supposed that she cast it from her pur- 
posely because its emptiness had brought 
her to this humiliation, and that the scene 
would close presently in a few quiet tears. 

I hoped that Kitty would let her go with- 
out scarring her too much with words 
and would not mind if I gave her a little 
money. There was no doubt in my mind 
but that this queer, ugly episode in which 
this woman butted like a clumsy animal 
at a gate she was not intelligent enough 
to open would dissolve and be replaced by 
some more pleasing composition in which 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 25 

we would take our proper parts ; in whicli, 
that is, she would turn from our rightness 
ashamed. Yet she cried: 

*^But Chris is ill!'' 

It took only a second for the compact 
insolence of the moment to penetrate, 
the amazing impertinence of the use of 
his name, the accusation of callousness 
she brought against us whose passion for 
Chris was our point of honor, because we 
would not shriek at her false news, the 
impudently bright, indignant gaze she 
flung at us, the lift of her voice that pre- 
tended she could not understand our cool- 
ness and irrelevance. I pushed the purse 
away from me with my toe, and hated her 
as the rich hate the poor as insect things 
that will struggle out of the crannies 
which are their decent home and intro- 
duce ugliness to the light of day. And 
Kitty said in a voice shaken with pitiless- 
ness : 

**You are impertinent. I know ex- 



26 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

actly what you are doing. You have read 
in the * Harrow Observer' or somewhere 
that my husband is at the front, and you 
come to tell this story because you think 
that you will get some money. I Ve read 
of such cases in the papers. You forget 
that if anything had happened to my hus- 
band the War Office would have told me. 
You should think yourself very lucky that 
I don't hand you over to the police." She 
shrilled a little before she came to the 
end. ** Please go!'' 

* * Kitty ! " I breathed. I was so ashamed 
that such a scene should spring from 
Chris's peril at the front that I wanted 
to go out into the garden and sit by the 
pond until the poor thing had removed 
her deplorable umbrella, her unpardon- 
able raincoat, her poor frustrated fraud. 
But Mrs. Grey, who had begun childishly 
and deliberately. **It 's you who are 
being — " and had desisted simply because 
she realized that there were no harsh 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 27 

notes on her lyre, and that she could not 
strike these chords that others found so 
easy, had fixed me with a certain wet, 
clear, patient gaze. It is the gift of ani- 
mals and those of peasant stock. From 
the least regarded, from an old horse 
nosing over a gate, or a drab in a work- 
house ward, it wrings the heart. From 
this woman — I said checkingly: 

^^Kitty!'' and reconciled her in an un- 
dertone. *' There 's some mistake. Got 
the name wrong, perhaps. Please tell us 
all about it.^' 

Mrs. Grey began a forward movement 
like a curtsy. She was groveling after 
that purse. When she rose, her face was 
pink from stooping, and her dignity swam 
uncertainly in a sea of half-shed tears. 
She said: 

*'I 'm sorry I 've upset you. But when 
you know a thing like that it isn't in 
flesh and blood to keep it from his wife. 
I am a married woman myself, and I 



28 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

know. I knew Mr. Baldry fifteen years 
ago.'' Her voice freely confessed that she 
had taken a liberty. *^ Quite a friend of 
the family he was.'' She had added that 
touch to soften the crude surprisingness of 
her announcement. It hardly did. ^*We 
lost sight of each other. It 's fifteen years 
since we last met. I had never seen nor 
heard of him nor thought to do again till 
I got this a week ago." 

She undid the purse and took out a tele- 
gram. I knew suddenly that all she said 
was true ; for that was why her hands had 
clasped that purse. 

**He isn't well! He isn't well!" she 
said pleadingly. **He 's lost his memory, 
and thinks — thinks he still knows me." 

She passed the telegram to Kitty, who 
read it, and laid it on her knee. 

^^See," said Mrs. Grey, *4t 's addressed 
to Margaret Allington, my maiden name, 
and I 've been married these ten years. 
And it was sent to my old home, Monkey 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 29 

Island, at Bray. Father kept the inn 
there. It 's fifteen years since we left it. 
I never should have got this telegram if 
me and my husband hadn't been down 
there last September and told the folks 
who keep it now who I was.'* 

Kitty folded up the telegram and said in 
a little voice: 

^^This is a likely story." 

Again Mrs. Grey's eyes brimmed. 
*^ People are rude to one," she visibly said, 
but surely not nice people like this. She 
simply continued to sit. 

Kitty cried out, as though arguing: 

** There 's nothing about shell-shock in 
this wire." 

Our visitor melted into a trembling 
shyness. 

** There was a letter, too." 

Kitty held out her hand. 

She gasped: 

*^0h, no, I couldn't do that!" 

*^I must have it," said Kitty. 



so THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

The caller's eyes grew great. She rose 
and dived clumsily for her umbrella, which 
had again slipped under the chair. 

* ^ I can 't, ' ' she cried, and scurried to the 
open door like a pelted dog. She would 
have run down the steps at once had not 
some tender thought arrested her. She 
turned to me trustfully and stammered, 
**He is at that hospital I said,*' as if, since 
I had dealt her no direct blow, I might 
be able to salve the news she brought from 
the general wreck of manners. And then 
Kitty's stiff pallor struck to her heart, and 
cried comfortingly across the distance, ^*I 
tell you, I haven't seen him for fifteen 
years." She faced about, pushed down 
her hat on her head, and ran down the 
steps to the gravel. **They won't under- 
stand!" we heard her sob. 

For a long time we watched her as she 
went along the drive, her yellowish rain- 
coat looking sick and bright in the sharp 
sunshine, her black plumes nodding like 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 31 

the pines above, her cheap boots making 
her walk on her heels, a spreading stain 
on the fabric of our life. When she was 
quite hidden by the dark clump of rhodo- 
dendrons at the corner, Kitty turned and 
went to the fireplace. She laid her arms 
against the oak mantel-piece and cooled 
her face against her arms. 

When at last I followed her she said: 

**Do you believe herf 

I started. I had forgotten that we had 
ever disbelieved her. 

**Yes,'' I replied. 

* ^ What can it mean ! ' ' She dropped her 
arms and stared at me imploringly. 
*^ Think, think, of something it can mean 
which isn't detestable!'' 

**It 's all a mystery," I said; and added 
madly, because nobody had ever been cross 
with Kitty, **You didn't help to clear it 
up." 

**0h, I know you think I was rude," 
she petulantly moaned; **but you 're so 



32 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

slow you don't see what it means. Either 
it means that he 's mad, our Chris, our 
splendid, sane Chris, all broken and 
queer, not knowing us — I can't bear 
to think of that. It can't be true. But if 
he isn't — Jenny, there was nothing in 
that telegram to show he 'd lost his mem- 
ory. It was just affection — a name that 
might have been a pet name, things that it 
was a little common to put in a telegram. 
It 's queer he should have written such a 
message, queer that he shouldn't have 
told me about knowing her, queer that he 
ever should have knoAvn such a woman. 
It shows there are bits of him we don't 
know. Things may be awfully wrong. 
It 's all such a breach of trust! I re- 
sent it." 

I was appalled by these stiff, dignified 
gestures that seemed to be plucking 
Chris's soul from his body, tormented 
though it was by this unknown calamity. 

^VBut Chris is ill!" I cried. 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 33 

She stared at me. 

^^You 're saying what she said." 

Indeed, there seemed no better words 
than those Mrs. Grey had used. I re- 
peated : 

*^Biit he is ill!'' 

She laid her face against her arms 
again. 

*^What does that matter T' she wailed. 
*^If he could send that telegram, he is no 
longer ours." 



CHAPTER II 

1WAS sorry the next morning that the 
post comes too late at Harrowweald to 
be brought up with the morning tea and 
waits for one at the breakfast table; for 
under Kitty's fixed gaze I had to open 
a letter which bore the Boulogne post- 
mark and was addressed in the writing 
of Frank Baldry, Chris's cousin, who is in 
the church. He wrote : 

Dear Jenny: 

You will have to break it to Kitty and try to 
make her take it as quietly as possible. This 
sentence will sound ominous as a start, but I ^m 
so full of the extraordinary thing that has hap- 
pened to Chris that I feel as if every living crea- 
ture was in possession of the facts. I don't 
know how much you know about it, so I 'd bet- 
ter begin at the beginning. Last Thursday I got 
a wire from Chris, saying that he had had con- 
cussion, though not seriously, and was in a hos- 
34 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 35 

pital about a mile from Boulogne, where he 
would be glad to see me. It struck me as odd 
that it had been sent to Ollenshaws, where I was 
curate fifteen years ago. Fortunately, I have 
always kept in touch with Sumpter, whom I 
regard as a specimen of the very best type of 
country clergymen, and he forwarded it without 
unnecessary delay. I started that evening, and 
looked hard for you and Kitty on the boat ; but 
came to the conclusion I should probably find 
you at the hospital. 

After having breakfasted in the town, — ^how 
superior French cooking is ! I would have looked 
in vain for such coffee, such an omelet, in my 
own parish, — I went off to look for the hospital. 
It is a girls' school, which has been taken over 
by the Red Cross, with fair-sized grounds and 
plenty of nice dry paths under the tilleuls. I 
could not see Chris for an hour, so I sat down 
on a bench by a funny, little round pond, with 
a stone coping, very French. Some wounded 
soldiers who came out to sit in the sun were 
rather rude because I was not in khaki, even 
when I explained that I was a priest of God 
and that the feeling of the bishops was strongly 
against the enlistment of the clergy. I do feel 
that the church has lost its grip on the masses. 



36 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

Then a nurse came out and took me in to see 
Chris. He is in a nice room, with a southern ex- 
posure, with three other officers, who seemed very- 
decent (not the "new army," I am glad to say). 
He was better than I had expected, but did not 
look quite himself. For one thing, he was oddly 
boisterous. He seemed glad to see me, and told 
me he could remember nothing about his concus- 
sion, but that he wanted to get back to Harrow- 
weald. He talked a lot about the wood and the 
upper pond and wanted to know if the daffies 
were out yet, and when he would be allowed to 
travel, because he felt that he would get well at 
once if only he could get home. And then he 
was silent for a minute, as though he was hold- 
ing something back. It will perhaps help you to 
realize the difficulty of my position when you 
understand that all this happened before I had 
been in the room five minutes! 

Without flickering an eyelid, quite easily and 
naturally, he gave me the surprising information 
that he was in love with a girl called Margaret 
Allington, who is the daughter of a man who 
keeps the inn on Monkey Island, at Bray on the 
Thames. He uttered some appreciations of this 
woman which I was too upset to note. I gasped, 
* ' How long has this been going on ? " He laughed 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 37 

at my surprise, and said, **Ever since I went 
down to stay with Uncle Ambrose at Dorney 
after I 'd got my B.Sc." Fifteen years ago ! I 
was still staring at him, unable to believe this 
barefaced admission of a deception carried on 
for years, when he went on to say that, though 
he had wired to her and she had wired a mes- 
sage in return, she had n 't said anything about 
coming over to see him. **Now,'' he said quite 
coolly, *'I know old Allington 's had a bad sea- 
son, — oh, I 'm quite well up in the innkeeping 
business these days, — and I think it may quite 
possibly be a lack of funds that is keeping her 
away. I Ve lost my check-book somewhere in 
the scrim, and so I wonder if you 'd send her 
some money. Or, better still, for she 's a shy 
country thing, you might fetch her." 

I stared. *' Chris," I said, '*I know the war 
is making some of us very lax, and I can only 
ascribe to that the shamelessness with which you 
admit the existence of a long-standing intrigue ; 
but when it comes to asking me to go over to 
England and fetch the woman — " He inter- 
rupted me with a sneer that we parsons are in- 
veterately eighteenth century and have our 
minds perpetually inflamed by visions of squires ' 
sons seducing country wenches, and declared 



38 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

that he meant to marry this Margaret Allington. 
**0h, indeed!" I said. **And may I ask what 
Kitty says to this arrang^ement ? " *'Who the 
devil is Kitty?" he asked blankly. "Kitty is 
your wife," I said quietly, but firmly. He sat 
up and shouted : ' * I have n 't got a wife ! Has 
some woman been turning up with a cock-and- 
bull story of being my wife? Because it 's the 
damnedest lie ! " 

I determined to settle the matter by sharp, 
common-sense handling. ''Chris,*' I said, ''you 
have evidently lost your memory. You were 
married to Kitty Ellis at St. George's, Hanover 
Square, on the third, or it may have been the 
fourth" — you know my wretched memory for 
dates— "of February, in 1906." He turned 
very pale and asked what year this was. 
"1916," I told him. He fell back in a fainting 
condition. The nurse came, and said I had done 
it all right this time, so she at least seemed to 
have known that he required a rude awakening, 
although the doctor, a very nice man, Winchester 
and New, told me he had known nothing of 
Chris's delusions. 

An hour later I was called back into the room. 
Chris was looking at himself in a hand-mirror, 
which he threw on the floor as I entered. "You 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 39 

are right," he said; **I 'm not twenty-one, but 
thirty-six." He said he felt lonely and afraid, 
and that I must bring Margaret Allington to him 
at once or he would die. Suddenly he stopped 
raving and asked, "Is father all right?" I 
prayed for guidance, and answered, "Your fa- 
ther passed away twelve years ago." He said, 
"Good God! can't you say he died/' and he 
turned over and lay with his back to me. I have 
never before seen a strong man weep, and it is 
indeed a terrible sight. He moaned a lot, and 
began to call for this Margaret. Then he turned 
over again and said, "Now tell us all about this 
Kitty that I Ve married." I told him she was 
a beautiful little woman, and mentioned that she 
had a charming and cultivated soprano voice. 
He said very fractiously: "I don't like little 
women, and I hate anybody, male or female, who 
sings. God, I don 't like this Kitty. Take her 
away ! ' ' And then he began to rave again about 
this woman. He said that he was consumed with 
desire for her and that he would never rest until 
he once more held her in his arms. I had no 
suspicion that Chris had this side to his nature, 
and it was almost a relief when he fainted again. 
I have not seen him since, and it is evening; 
but I have had a long talk with the doctor, who 



40 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

says that he has satisfied himself that Chris is 
suffering from a loss of memory extending over 
a period of fifteen years. He says that though, 
of course, it will be an occasion of great trial to 
us all, he thinks that, in view of Chris 's expressed 
longing for Harrowweald, he ought to be taken 
home, and advises me to make all arrangements 
for bringing him back some time next week. I 
hope I shall be upheld in this difficult enterprise. 
In the meantime I leave it to you to prepare 
Kitty for this terrible shock. I could have 
wished it were a woman of a different type who 
was to see my poor cousin through these dark 
days, but convey to her my deepest sympathy. 
Indeed, I never realized the horror of warfare 
until I saw my cousin, of whose probity I am as 
firmly convinced as of my own wantonly repudi- 
ating his most sacred obligations. 

Yours ever, 

Frank. 

Over my shoulder Kitty muttered: 
**And he always pretended he liked my 
singing.'' Then she gripped my arm and 
shrieked in a possessive fury: ** Bring him 
home ! Bring him home ! ' ' 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 41 

So, a week later, they brought Chris 
home. 

From breakfast-time that day the house 
was pervaded with a day-before-the- 
funeral feeling. Although all duties aris- 
ing from the occasion had been performed, 
one could settle to nothing else. Chris 
was expected at one, but then there came 
a telegram to say he was delayed till the 
late afternoon. So Kitty, whose beauty 
was as changed in grief from its ordinary 
seeming as a rose in moonlight is different 
from a rose by day, took me down after 
lunch to the greenhouses and had a snap- 
pishly competent conversation about the 
year's vegetables with Pipe, the gardener. 
Then Kitty went into the drawing-room 
and filled the house with the desolate mer- 
riment of an inattentively played pianola, 
while I sat in the hall and wrote letters 
and noticed how sad dance-music has 
sounded ever since the war began. After 



42 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

that she started a savage raid of domestic 
efficiency, and made the housemaids cry 
because the brass handles of the tall-boys 
were not bright enough and because there 
was only ten-to-one instead of a hundred- 
to-one risk of breaking a leg on the par- 
quet. Then she had tea, and hated the 
soda-cake. She was a little, shrunk thing, 
huddled in the arm-chair farthest from 
the light, when at last the big car came 
nosing up the drive through the dark. 

We stood up. Through the thudding 
of the engines came the sound of Chris's 
great male voice which always had in it 
a note like the baying of a big dog. 
** Thanks, I can manage by myself." I 
heard, amazed, his step ring strong upon 
the stone, for I had felt his absence as a 
kind of death from which he would emerge 
ghostlike, impalpable. And then he stood 
in the doorway, the gloom blurring his out- 
lines like fur, the faint, clear candle-light 
catching the fair down on his face. He 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 43 

did not see me, in my dark dress, or hud- 
dled Kitty, and with the sleepy smile of 
one who returns to a dear, familiar place 
to rest he walked into the hall and laid 
down his stick and his khaki cap beside 
the candlestick on the oak table. With 
both hands he felt the old wood, and stood 
humming happily through his teeth. 

I cried out, because I had seen that his 
hair was of three colors now, brown and 
gold and silver. 

With a quick turn of the head, he found 
me out in the shadows. 

'^ Hullo, Jenny!'' he said, and gripped 
my hands. 

''0 Chris, I am so glad!" I stuttered, 
and then could say no more for shame that 
I was thirty-five instead of twenty. For 
his eyes had hardened in the midst of his 
welcome, as though he had trusted that 
I at least would have been no party to this 
conspiracy to deny that he was young, and 
he said: 



44 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

^*I 've dropped Frank in town. My 
temper 's of the convalescent type." He 
might as well have said, **I 've dropped 
Frank, who had grown old, like you." 

^^ Chris," I went on, *4t 's so wonderful 
to have you safe." 

*^Safe," he repeated. He sighed very 
deeply and continued to hold my hands. 
There was a rustle in the shadows, and he 
dropped my hands. 

The face that looked out of the dimness 
to him was very white, and her upper lip 
was lifted over her teeth in a distressed 
grimace. It was immediately as plain as 
though he had shouted it that this sad 
mask meant nothing to him. He knew 
not because memory had given him any in- 
sight into her heart, but because there is 
an instinctive kindliness in him which 
makes him wise about all suffering, that it 
would hurt her if he asked if this was his 
wife; but his body involuntarily began a 
gesture of inquiry before he realized that 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 45 

that, too, would hurt her, and he checked 
it half-way. So, through a silence, he 
stood before her slightly bent, as though 
he had been maimed. 

*^I am your wife." There was a weak, 
wailing anger behind the words. 

* * Kitty, ' ' he said softly and kindly. He 
looked around for some graciousness to 
make the scene less wounding, and stooped 
to kiss her ; but he could not. The thought 
of another woman made him unable to 
breathe, sent the blood running under his 
skin. 

With a toss, like a child saying, **Well, 
if you don't want to, I 'm sure I wouldn't 
for the world!" Kitty withdrew from 
the suspended caress. He watched her 
retreat into the shadows as though she 
were a symbol of this new life by which 
he was baffled and oppressed, until the 
darkness outside became filled with the 
sound like the surf which we always hear 
at Harrowweald on angry evenings, and 



46 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

his eyes became distant, and his lips 
smiled. **Up here — ^in this old place — 
how one hears the pines!*' 

She cried out from the other end of the 
room, as though she were speaking with 
some one behind a shut door: 

'*I Ve ordered dinner at seven. I 
thought you 'd probably have missed a 
meal or two, or would want to go to bed 
early." She said it very smartly, with 
her head on one side like a bird, as if she 
was pleading that he would find her very 
clever about ordering dinner and thinking 
of his comfort. 

**Good," he said. **I 'd better dress 
now, hadn't If He looked up the stair- 
case, and would have gone up had I not 
held him back; for the little room in the 
south wing, with the fishing-rods and the 
old books, w'ent in the rebuilding, ab- 
sorbed by the black-and-white magnifi- 
cence that is Kitty's bedroom. 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 47 

**0h, I '11 take you up," Kitty rang out 
efficiently. She pulled at his coat-sleeve, 
so they started level on the lowest step. 
But as they went up, the sense of his 
separateness beat her back; she lifted her 
arms as though she struggled through a 
fog, and fell behind. When he reached 
the top she was standing half-way down 
the stairs, her hands clasped under her 
chin. But he did not see her. He was 
looking along the corridor and saying, 
**This house is different.'' If the soul has 
to stay in its coffin till the lead is struck 
asunder, in its captivity it speaks with 
such a voice. 

She braced herself with a gallant laugh. 

**How you Ve forgotten!" she cried, 
and ran up to him, rattling her keys and 
looking grave with housewifery, and I was 
left alone with the dusk and the familiar 
things. The dusk flowed in wet and cool 
from the garden, as if to put out the fire 



48 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

of confusion lighted on our hearthstone, 
and the furniture, very visible through 
that soft evening opacity with the observ- 
ant brightness of old, well-polished wood, 
seemed terribly aware. Strangeness had 
come into the house, and everything was 
appalled by it, even time. For the mo- 
ments dragged. It seemed to me, half an 
hour later, that I had been standing for 
an infinite period in the drawing-room, re- 
membering that in the old days the blinds 
had never been drawn in this room because 
old Mrs. Baldry had liked to see the night 
gathering like a pool in the valley while 
the day lingered as a white streak above 
the farthest hills, and perceiving in pain 
that the heavy blue blinds that shroud the 
nine windows because a lost Zeppelin 
sometimes clanks like a skeleton across the 
sky above us would make his home seem 
even more like prison. 

I began to say what was in my mind to 
Kitty when she came in, but she moved 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 49 

past me, remote in preoccupation, and I 
was silent when I saw that she was dressed 
in all respects like a bride. The gown she 
wore on her wedding-day ten years ago 
had been cut and embroidered as this 
white satin was; her hair had been coiled 
low on her neck, as it was now. Around 
her throat were her pearls, and her longer 
chain of diamonds dropped, looking cruelly 
bright, to her white, small breasts ; because 
she held some needlework to her bosom, 
I saw that her right hand was stiff with 
rings and her left hand bare save for her 
wedding-ring. She dropped her load of 
flannel on a work-table and sat down, 
spreading out her skirts, in an arm-chair 
by the fire. With her lower lip thrust 
out, as if she were considering a menu, 
she lowered her head and looked down on 
herself. She frowned to see that the high 
lights on the satin shone scarlet from the 
fire, that her flesh glowed like a rose, and 
she changed her seat for a high-backed 



50 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

chair beneath the farthest candle-sconce. 
There were green curtains close by, and 
now the lights on her satin gown were 
green like cleft ice. She looked as cold 
as moonlight, as virginity, but precious; 
the falling candle-light struck her hair to 
bright, pure gold. So she waited for him. 

There came suddenly a thud at the door. 
We heard Chris swear and stumble to his 
feet, while one of the servants spoke help- 
fully. Kitty knitted her brows, for she 
hates gracelessness, and a failure of physi- 
cal adjustment is the worst indignity she 
can conceive. 

**He 's fallen down those three steps 
from the hall," I whispered. ** They 're 
new." She did not listen, because she was 
controlling her face into harmony with the 
appearance of serene virginity upon which 
his eyes would fall when he entered the 
room. 

His fall had ruffled him and made him 
look very large and red, and he breathed 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 51 

hard, like an animal pursued into a strange 
place by night, and to his hot conscious- 
ness of his disorder the sight of Kitty, her 
face and hands and bosom shining like the 
snow, her gown enfolding her, and her 
gold hair crowning her with radiance, and 
the white fire of jewels giving passion to 
the spectacle, was a deep refreshment. 
She sat still for a time, so that he might 
feel this well, then raised her ringed hand 
to her necklaces. 

**It seems so strange that you should not 
remember me," she said. **You gave me 
all these." 

He answered kindly : 

**I am glad I did that. You look very 
beautiful in them." But as he spoke his 
gaze shifted to the shadows in the corners 
of the room, and the blood ran hot under 
his skin. He was thinking of another 
woman, of another beauty. 

Kitty put up her hands as if to defend 
her jewels. 



52 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

In that silence dinner was announced, 
and we went into the dining-room. It is 
the fashion at Baldry Court to use no 
electric light save when there is work to 
be done or a great company to be enter- 
tained, and to eat and talk by the mild 
clarity of many candles. That night it 
was a kindly fashion, for we sat about the 
table with our faces veiled in shadow, and 
seemed to listen in quiet contentment to 
the talk of our man who had come back to 
us. Yet all through the meal I was near 
to weeping, because whenever he thought 
himself unobserved he looked at the things 
that were familiar to him. Dipping his 
head, he would glance sidewise at the old 
oak paneling, and nearer things he figured 
as though sight were not intimate enough 
a contact. His hand caressed the arm of 
his chair, because he remembered the black 
gleam of it, stole out and touched the 
recollected salt-cellar. It was his furtive- 
ness that was heartrending; it was as 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 53 

though he were an outcast, and we who 
loved him stout policemen. Was Baldry 
Court so sleek a place that the unhappy 
felt offenders there? Then we had all 
been living wickedly, and he, too. As his 
.fingers glided here and there he talked 
bravely about non-committal things: to 
what ponies we had been strapped when at 
the age of five we were introduced to the 
hunting-field; how we had teased to be 
allowed to keep swans in the pond above 
the wood, and how the yellow bills of our 
intended pets had sent us shrieking home- 
ward; and all the dear life that makes 
the bland English country-side secretly 
adventurous. ** Funny thing," he said. 
"All the time I was at Boulogne I wanted 
to see a kingfisher, that blue scudding 
down a stream, or a heron's flight round a 
willow — " He checked himself suddenly; 
his head fell forward on his chest. **You 
have no herons here, of course,'' he said 
drearily, and fingered the arm of his chair 



54 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

again. Then he raised his head again, 
brisk with another subject. **Do they 
still have trouble with foxes at Steppy 
Endr^ 

Kitty shook her head. 

**I don't know." 

** Griffiths will know," Chris said 
cheerily, and swung round on his seat 
to ask the butler, and found him osseous, 
where Griffiths was rotund; dark, where 
Griffiths had been merrily mottled; 
strange, where Griffiths had been a part 
of home, a condition of life. He sat back 
in his chair as though his heart had 
stopped. 

When the butler who is not Griffiths 
had left the room he spoke gruffly. 

*^ Stupid of me, I know; but where is 
Griffiths?" 

**Dead seven years ago," said Kitty, her 
eyes on her plate. 

He sighed deeply in a shuddering 
horror. 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 55 

^^I 'm sorry. He was a good man.'' 

I cleared my throat. 

** There are new people here, Chris, bnt 
they love yon as the old ones did." 

He forced himself to smile at ns both, 
to a gay response. 

^*As if I didn't know^ that to-night!" 

Bnt he did not know it. Even to me 
he wonld give no trust, because it was 
Jenny the girl who had been his friend 
and not Jenny the woman. All the in- 
habitants at this new tract of time were 
his enemies, all its circumstances his 
prison-bars. There was suspicion in the 
gesture with which, when we were back 
in the drawing-room he picked up the 
flannel from the work-table. 

^* Whose is this!" he said curiously. 
His mother had been a hard-riding woman, 
not apt with her needle. 

** Clothes for one of the cottages," an- 
swered Kitty, breathlessly. ^^We — we Ve 
a lot of responsibilities, you and I. With 



56 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

all of tlie land you 've bought, there are 
ever so many people to look after." 

He moved his shoulders uneasily, as if 
under a yoke, and, after he had drunk his 
coffee, pulled up one of the blinds and 
went out to pace the flagged walk under 
the windows. Kitty huddled carelessly 
by the fire, her hands over her face, un- 
heeding by its red glow she looked not 
so virginal and bride-like; so I think she 
was to distracted even to plan. I went 
to the piano. Through this evening of 
sentences cut short because their completed 
meaning was always sorrow, of normal 
life dissolved to tears, the chords of 
Beethoven sounded serenely. 

**So you like Jenny," said Kitty, sud- 
denly, **to play Beethoven when it 's the 
war that 's caused all this. I could have 
told that you would have chosen to play 
German music this night of all nights." 

So I began a saraband by Pur cell, a jolly 
thing that makes one see a plump, sound 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 57 

woman dancing on a sanded floor in some 
old inn, with casks of good ale all about 
her and a world of sunshine and May lanes 
without. As I played I wondered if things 
like this happened when Purcell wrote 
such music, empty of everything except 
laughter and simple greeds and satisfac- 
tions and at worst the wail of unrequited 
love. Why had modern life brought forth 
these horrors, which made the old trage- 
dies seem no more than nursery-shows? 
And the sky also is different. Behind 
Chris's head, as he halted at the open 
window, a search-light turned all ways in 
the night, like a sword brandished among 
the stars. 

^^ Kitty.'' 

^'Yes, Chris." She was sweet and 
obedient and alert. 

^*I know my conduct must seem to 
you perversely insulting," — behind him 
the search-light wheeled while he gripped 
the sides of the window, — '*but if I do 



58 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

not see Margaret Allington I shall die.'' 

She raised her hands to her jewels, and 
pressed the cool globes of her pearls into 
her flesh. **She lives near here/' she said 
easily. **I will send the car down for her 
to-morrow. Yoja shall see as much of her 
as you like." 

His arms fell to his sides. 

^* Thank you," he muttered; *^you 're all 
being so kind — " He disengaged himself 
into the darkness. 

I was amazed at Kitty's beautiful act 
and more amazed to find that it had made 
her face ugly. Her eyes snapped as they 
met mine. 

*'That dowd!" she said, keeping her 
voice low, so that he might not hear it as 
he passed to and fro before the window. 
**That dowd!" 

This sudden abandonment of beauty 
and amiability meant so much in our Kitty, 
whose law of life is grace, that I went over 
and kissed her. 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 59 

*^Dear, you 're taking things all the 
wrong way/' I said. ^* Chris is ill — " 

**He 's well enough to remember her all 
right," she replied unanswerably. Her 
silver shoe tapped the floor; she pinched 
her lips for some moments. '* After all, 
I suppose I can sit down to it. Other 
women do. Teddy Rex keeps a Gaiety 
girl, and Mrs. Rex has to grin and bear 
it." She shrugged in answer to my 
silence. **What else is it, do you think? 
It means that Chris is a man like other 
men. But I did think that bad women 
were pretty. I suppose he 's had so much 
to do with pretty ones that a plain one 's 
a change." 

** Kitty! Kitty! how. can you!" 

But her little pink mouth went on man- 
ufacturing malice. 

**This is all a blind," she said at the end 
of an unpardonable sentence. **He 's pre- 
tending. ' ' 

I, who had felt his agony all the evening 



60 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

like a wound in my own body, was past 
speech then, and I did not care what I 
did to stop her. I gripped her small 
shoulders with my large hands, and shook 
her till her jewels rattled and she scratched 
my fingers and gasped for breath. But I 
did not mind so long as she was silent. 

Chris spoke from the darkness. 

*^ Jenny!" I let her go. He came in 
and stood over us, running his hand 
through his hair unhappily. *^Let 's all 
be decent to each other, '* he said heavily. 
*^It 's all such a muddle, and it 's so rotten 
for all of us — " 

Kitty shook herself neat and stood up. 

*^Why don't you say, * Jenny, you 
mustn't be rude to visitors'? It 's how 
you feel, I know." She gathered up her 
needlework. *^I 'm going to bed. It 's 
been a horrid night. ' ' 

She spoke so pathetically, like a child 
who hasn't enjoyed a party as much as 
it had thought it would, that both of us 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 61 

felt a stir of tenderness toward her as she 
left the room. We smiled sadly at each 
other as we sat down by the fire, and I 
perceived that, perhaps because I was 
flushed and looked younger, he felt more 
intimate with me than he had yet done 
since his return. Indeed, in the warm, 
friendly silence that followed he was like 
a patient when tiring visitors have gone 
and he is left alone with his trusted nurse ; 
smiled under drooped lids and then paid 
me the high compliment of disregard. 
His limbs relaxed, he sank back into his 
chair. I watched him vigilantly, and was 
ready at that moment when thought in- 
truded into his drowsings and his face 
began to twitch. I asked : 
** You can't remember her at all!" 
**0h, yes,'* he said, without raising his 
eyelids, *4n a sense. I know how she 
bows when you meet her in the street, 
how she dresses when she goes to church. 
I know her as one knows a woman stay- 



62 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

ing in the same hotel, just like that/' 
*^It 's a pity you can't remember Kitty. 
All that a wife should be she 's been to 
you. ' ' 

He sat forward, warming his palms at 
the blaze and hunching his shoulders as 
though there were a draft. His silence 
compelled me to look at him, and I found 
his eyes, cold and incredulous and fright- 
ened, on me. 
*Menny, is this truef 
'' That Kitty 's been a good wifer' 
**That Kitty is my wife, that I am old, 
that'' — he waved a hand at the altered 
room — **all this." 

**It is all true. She is your wife, and 
this place is changed, and it 's better and 
jollier in all sorts of ways, believe me, 
and fifteen years have passed. Why, 
Chris, can't you see that I have grown 
old!" My vanity could hardly endure his 
slow stare, but I kept my fingers clasped 
on my lap. **You see?" 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 63 

He turned away with an assenting 
mutter ; but I saw that deep down in him, 
not to be moved by any material proof, his 
spirit was incredulous. 

^^Tell me what seems real to you," I 
begged. ** Chris, be a pal. I '11 never 
tell.'' 

**M-m-m," he said. His elbows were 
on his knees, and his hands stroked his 
thick tarnished hair. I could not see his 
face, but I knew that his skin was red 
and that his gray eyes were wet and bright. 
Then suddenly he lifted his chin and 
laughed, like a happy swimmer breaking 
through a wave that has swept him far in- 
shore. He glowed with a radiance that 
illuminated the moment till my blood 
tingled and I began to rub my hands to- 
gether and laugh, too. **Why, Monkey 
Island 's real. But you don't know old 
Monkev, Let me tell you." 



CHAPTER III 

CHRIS told the story lingeringly, in 
loving detail. From Uncle Am- 
brose's gates, it seems, one took the path 
across the meadow where Whiston's cows 
are put to graze, passed through the second 
stile — the one between the two big alders 
— into a long straight road that ran across 
the flat lands to Bray. After a mile or so 
there branched from it a private road that 
followed a line of noble poplars down to 
the ferry. Between two of them — he de- 
scribed it meticulously, as though it were 
of immense significance — there stood a 
white hawthorn. In front were the dark- 
green, glassy waters of an unvisited back- 
water, and beyond them a bright lawn set 
with many walnut-trees and a few great 
chestnuts, well lighted with their candles, 

64 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 65 

and to the left of that a low, white house 
with a green dome rising in its middle, 
and a veranda with a roof of hammered 
iron that had gone verdigris-color with 
age and the Thames weather. This was 
the Monkey Island Inn. The third Duke 
of Marlborough had built it for a ** folly," 
and perching there with nothing but a 
line of walnut-trees and a fringe of lawn 
between it and the fast, full, shining 
Thames, it had an eighteenth-century 
grace and silliness. 

Well, one sounded the bell that hung 
on a post, and presently Margaret in a 
white dress would come out of the porch 
and would walk to the stone steps down 
to the river. Invariably, as she passed the 
walnut-tree that overhung the path, she 
would pick a leaf, crush it, and sniff the 
sweet scent ; and as she came near the steps 
she would shade her eyes and peer across 
the water. *^She is a little near-sighted; 
you can't imagine how sweet it makes her 



66 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

look/' Chris explained. (I did not say 
that I had seen her, for, indeed, this 
Margaret I had never seen.) A sudden 
serene gravity would show that she had 
seen one, and she would get into the four- 
foot punt that was used as a ferry and 
bring it over very slowly, with rather stiff 
movements of her long arms, to exactly the 
right place. When she had got the punt 
up on the gravel her serious brow would 
relax, and she would smile at one and 
shake hands and say something friendly, 
like, *^ Father thought you 'd be over this 
afternoon, it being so fine; so he 's saved 
some duck's eggs for tea.'* 

And then one took the pole from her 
and brought her back to the island, though 
probably one did not mount the steps to 
the lawn for a long time. It was so good 
to sit in the punt by the landing-stage 
while Margaret dabbled her hands in the 
black waters and forgot her shyness as one 
talked. *'She 's such good company. 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 67 

She 's got an accurate mind that would 
have made her a good engineer, but when 
she picks up facts she kind of gives them a 
motherly hug. She 's charity and love 
itself.'' (Again I did not say that I had 
seen her.) If people drifted in to tea, 
one had to talk to her while she cut the 
bread and butter and the sandwiches in 
the kitchen, but in this year of floods few 
visitors cared to try the hard rowing be- 
low Bray Lock. 

So usually one sat down there in the 
boat, talking with a sense of leisure, as 
though one had all the rest of one's life 
in which to carry on this conversation, and 
noting how the reflected ripple of the 
water made a bright, vibrant, mark upon 
her throat, and other effects of the scene 
upon her beauty, until the afternoon grew 
drowsy, and she said, ^^ Father will be 
wanting his tea." And they would go 
up and find old AUington, in white ducks, 
standing in the fringe of long grasses and 



68 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

cow-parsley on the other edge of the 
island, looking to his poultry or his rab- 
bits. He was a little man, with a tuft of 
copper-colored hair rising from the middle 
of his forehead like a clown's curl, who 
skook hands hard and explained very soon 
that he was a rough diamond. 

Then they all had tea under the walnut- 
tree where the canary's cage was hanging, 
and the ducks' eggs would be brought out, 
and Mr. Allington would talk much 
Thames-side gossip: how the lock-keeper 
at Teddington had had his back broken 
by a swan, mad as swans are in May; how 
they would lose their license at the Dove- 
tail Arms if they were not careful; and 
how the man who kept the inn by Surly 
Hall was like to die, because after he had 
been cursing his daughter for two days for 
having run away with a soldier from 
Windsor Barracks, he had suddenly seen 
her white face in a clump of rushes in the 
river just under the hole in the garden 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 69 

fence. Margaret would sit quiet, round- 
eyed at the world's ways, and shy because 
of Chris. 

So they would sit on that bright lawn 
until the day was dyed with evening blue, 
and Mr. Allington was more and more 
often obliged to leap into the punt to chase 
his ducks, which had started on a trip to 
Bray Lock, or to crawl into the under- 
growth after rabbits similarly demoralized 
by the dusk. 

Then Chris would say he had to go, 
and they would stand in a communing 
silence while the hearty voice of Mr. Al- 
lington shouted from midstream or under 
the alder-boughs a disregarded invitation 
to stay and have a bite of supper. In the 
liquefaction of colors which happens on a 
sunmier evening, when the green grass 
seemed like a precious fluid poured out on 
the earth and dripping over to the river, 
and the chestnut candles were no longer 
proud flowers, but just wet, white lights 



70 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

in the humid mass of the tree, when the 
brown earth seemed just a little denser 
than the water, Margaret also partici- 
pated. 

Chris explained this part of his story 
stumblingly; but I, too, have watched 
people I loved in the dusk, and I know 
what he meant. As she sat in the punt 
while he ferried himself across it was no 
longer visible that her fair hair curled 
differently and that its rather wandering 
parting was a little on one side; that her 
straight brows, which were a little darker 
than her hair, were nearly always con- 
tracted in a frown of conscientious specu- 
lation ; that her mouth and chin were noble, 
yet as delicate as flowers ; that her shoul- 
ders were slightly hunched because her 
young body, like a lily-stem, found it diffi- 
cult to manage its own tallness. She was 
then just a girl in white who lifted a white 
face or drooped a dull-gold head. Then 
she was nearer to him than at any other 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 71 

time. That he loved her in this twilight, 
which obscured all the physical details 
which he adored, seemed to him a guaran- 
tee that theirs was a changeless love which 
would persist if she were old or maimed or 
disfigured. 

He stood beside the crazy post where 
the bell hung and watched the white figure 
take the punt over the black waters, 
mount the gray steps, and assume some of 
their grayness, become a green shade in 
the green darkness of the foliage-darkened 
lawn, and he exulted in that guarantee. 

How long this went on he had for- 
gotten ; but it continued for some time be- 
fore there came the end of his life, the last 
day he could remember. I was barred out 
of that day. His lips told me of its 
physical appearances, while from his wet, 
bright eyes and his flushed skin, his beauti- 
ful signs of a noble excitement, I tried to 
derive the real story. It seemed that the 
day when he bicycled over to Monkey 



72 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

Island, happy because Uncle Ambrose had 
gone up to town and he could stay to 
supper with the AUingtons, was the most 
glorious day the year had yet brought. 
The whole world seemed melting into 
light. Cumulus-clouds floated very high, 
like lumps of white light, against a deep, 
glowing sky, and dropped dazzling re- 
flections on the beaming Thames. The 
trees moved not like timber, shocked by 
wind, but floatingly, like weeds at the 
bottom of a well of sunshine. When 
Margaret came out of the porch and 
paused, as she always did, to crush and 
smell the walnut-leaf and shade her eyes 
with her hand, her white dress shone like 
silver. 

She brought the punt across and said 
very primly, *^Dad will be disappointed; 
he 's gone up to town on business,'' and 
answered gravely, *'That is very kind of 
you," when he took the punt-pole from 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 73 

her and said laughingly: ** Never mind. 
I '11 come and see yon all the same." (I 
could see them as Chris spoke, so young 
and pale and solemn, with the intense light 
spilling all around them.) That after- 
noon they did not sit in the punt by 
the landing-stage, but wandered about the 
island and played with the rabbits and 
looked at the ducks and were inordinately 
silent. For a long time they stood in the 
fringe of rough grass on the other side 
of the island, and Margaret breathed con- 
tentedly that the Thames was so beauti- 
ful. Past the spit of sand at the far end 
of the island, where a great swan swanked 
to the empty reach that it would protect 
its mate against all comers, the river 
opened to a silver breadth between flat 
meadows stretching back to far rows of 
pin-thick black poplars, until it wound 
away to Windsor behind a line of high 
trees whose heads were bronze with un- 



74 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

opened buds, and whose flanks were hid- 
den by a head of copper-beech and crimson 
and white hawthorn. 

Chris said he would take her down to 
Domey Lock in the skiff, and she got in 
very silently and obediently; but as soon 
as they were out in midstream she de- 
veloped a sense of duty, and said she could 
not leave the inn with just that boy to 
look after it. And then she went into the 
kitchen and, sucking in her lower lip for 
shyness, very conscientiously cut piles of 
bread and butter in case some visitors 
came to tea. Just when Chris was con- 
vincing her of the impossibility of any 
visitors arriving they came, a fat woman 
in a luscious pink blouse and an old chap 
who had been rowing in a tweed waistcoat. 
Chris went out, though Margaret laughed 
and trembled and begged him not to, and 
waited on them. It should have been a 
great lark, but suddenly he hated them, 
and when they offered him a tip for push- 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 75 

ing the boat off, he snarled absurdly and 
ran back, miraculously relieved, to the 
bar-parlor. 

Still Margaret would not leave the 
island. *^ Supposing, '' she said, **that Mr. 
Learoyd comes for his ale. ' ' But she con- 
sented to walk with him to the wild part 
of the island, where poplars and alders 
and willows grew round a clearing in 
which white willow-herb and purple fig- 
wort and here and there a potato-flower, 
last ailing consequence of one of Mr. 
Allington's least successful enterprises, 
fought down to the fringe of iris on the 
river's lip. In this gentle jungle was a 
rustic seat, relic of a reckless aspiration 
on the part of Mr. Allington to make this 
a pleasure-garden, and on it they sat until 
a pale moon appeared above the green 
corn-field on the other side of the river. 
**Not six yet," he said, taking out his 
watch. **Not six yet," she repeated. 
Words seemed to bear more significance 



76 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

than they had ever borne before. Then 
a heron flapped gigantic in front of the 
moon, and swnng in wide circles round 
the willow-tree before them. * * Oh, look ! ' ' 
she cried. He seized the hand she flung 
upward and gathered her into his arms. 
They were so for long, while the great 
bird's wings beat about them. 

Afterward she pulled at his hand. She 
wanted to go back across the lawn and 
walk round the inn, which looked mourn- 
ful, as unlit houses do by dusk. They 
passed beside the green-and-white stucco 
barrier of the veranda and stood on the 
three-cornered lawn that shelved high over 
the stream at the island's end, regarding 
the river, which was now something more 
wonderful than water, because it had taken 
to its bosom the rose and amber glories 
of the sunset smoldering behind the elms 
and Bray church-tower. Birds sat on the 
telegraph wires that spanned the river as 
the black notes sit on a staff of music. 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 77 

Then she went to the window of the parlor 
and rested her cheek against the glass, 
looking in. The little room was sad with 
twilight, and there was nothing to be seen 
but Margaret's sewing-machine on the 
table and the enlarged photograph of 
Margaret's mother over the mantel-piece, 
and the views of Tintern Abbey framed 
in red plush, and on the floor, the mari- 
gold pattern making itself felt through 
the dusk, Mr. Allington's carpet slippers. 
** Think of me sitting in there," she 
whispered, **not knowing you loved me." 
Then they went into the bar and drank 
milk, while she walked about fingering 
familiar things with an absurd expression 
of exaltation, as though that day she was 
fond of everything, even the handles of the 
beer-engine. 

When there had descended on them a 
night as brilliant as the day he drew her 
out into the darkness, which was sweet 
with the scent of walnut-leaves, and they 



78 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

went across the lawn, bending beneath the 
chestnut-boughs, not to the wild part of 
the island, but to a circle of smooth turf 
divided from it by a railing of wrought 
iron. On this stood a small Greek temple, 
looking very lovely in the moonlight. He 
had never brought Margaret here before, 
because Mr. AUington had once told him, 
spatulate forefinger at his nose, that it had 
been built for the **dook" for his excesses, 
and it was in the quality of his love for 
her that he could not bear to think of her 
in association with anything base. But to- 
night there was nothing anywhere but 
beauty. He lifted her in his arms and 
carried her within the columns, and made 
her stand in a niche above the altar. A 
strong stream of moonlight rushed upon 
her there; by its light he could not tell 
if her hair was white as silver or yellow as 
gold, and again he was filled with exalta- 
tion because he knew that it would not 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 79 

have mattered if it had been white. His 
love was changeless. Lifting her down 
from the niche, he told her so. 

And as he spoke, her warm body melted 
to nothingness in his arms. The columns 
that had stood so hard and black against 
the quivering tide of moonlight and star- 
light seemed to totter and dissolve. He 
was lying in a hateful world where barbed- 
wire entanglements showed impish knots 
against a livid sky full of blooming noise 
and splashes of fire and wails for water, 
and his back was hurting intolerably. 

Chris fell to blowing out the candles, 
and I, perhaps because the egotistical part 
of me was looking for something to say 
that would make him feel me devoted and 
intimate, could not speak. 

Suddenly he desisted, stared at a candle- 
flame, and said: 

**If you had seen the way she rested her 
cheek against the glass and looked into the 



80 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

little room you 'd understand that I can't 
say, *Yes, Kitty 's my wife, and Margaret 
somehow just nothing at all. ' ' 

^*0f course you can't,'' I murmured 
sympathetically. 

We gripped hands, and he brought 
down on our conversation the finality of 
darkness. 



CHAPTER IV 

NEXT morning it appeared that the 
chauffeur had taken the oar up to 
town to get a part replaced, and Margaret 
could not be brought from Wealdstone till 
the afternoon. It fell to me to fetch her. 
^^At least,'' Kitty had said, **I might 
be spared that humiliation." Before I 
started I went to the pond on the hilPs 
edge. It is a place where autumn lives for 
half the year, for even when the spring 
lights tongues of green fire in the under- 
growth, and the valley shows sunlit be- 
tween the tree-trunks, here the pond is 
fringed with yellow bracken and tinted 
bramble, and the water flows amber over 
last winter's leaves. 

Through this brown gloom, darkened 
now by a surly sky, Chris was taking the 

81 



82 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

skiff, standing in the stem and using Ms 
oar like a gondolier. He had come down 
here soon after breakfast, driven from the 
house by the strangeness of all but the 
outer walls, and discontented with the 
grounds because everything but this wet, 
intractable spot bore the marks of Kitty's 
genius. After lunch there had been an- 
other attempt to settle down, but with a 
grim glare at a knot of late Christmas 
roses bright in a copse that fifteen years 
ago had been dark he went back to 
the russet-eaved boat-house and this play 
with the skiff. It was a boy's sport, and 
it was dreadful to see him turn a middle- 
aged face as he brought the boat inshore. 

**I 'm just going down to fetch Mar- 
garet," I said. 

He thanked me for it. 

**But, Chris, I must tell you. I We seen 
Margaret. She came up here, so kind and 
sweet, to tell us you were wounded. She 's 
the greatest dear in the world, but she 's 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 83 

not as you think of her. She 's old, Chris. 
She is n 't beautiful any longer. She 's 
drearily married. She 's seamed and 
scored and ravaged by squalid circum- 
stances. You can't love her when you see 
her." 

** Did n't I tell you last night," he said, 
**that that doesn't matter!" He dipped 
his oar to a stroke that sent him away 
from -me. *^ Bring her soon. I shall wait 
for her down here." 

Wealdstone is not, in its way, a bad 
place; it lies in the lap of open country, 
and at the end of every street rise the 
green hills of Harrow and the spires of 
Harrow School. But all the streets are 
long and red and freely articulated with 
railway arches, and factories spoil the sky- 
line with red, angular chimneys, and in 
front of the shops stood little women with 
backs ridged by cheap stays, who tapped 
their upper lips with their forefingers and 
made other feeble, doubtful gestures, as 



84 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

though they wanted to buy something and 
knew that if they did they would have 
to starve some other appetite. When we 
asked them the way they turned to us 
faces sour with thrift. It was a town of 
people who could not do as they liked. 

And here Margaret lived in a long road 
of red-brick boxes, flecked here and there 
with the pink blur of almond-blossom, 
which debouched in a flat field where 
green grass rose up rank through clay 
mold blackened by coal-dust from tlie rail- 
way. Mariposa, which was the last house 
in the road, did not even have an almond- 
tree. In the front garden, which seemed 
to be imperfectly reclaimed from the 
greasy field, yellow crocus and some sod- 
den squills just winked, and the back, 
where a man was handling a spade with- 
out mastery, presented the austere appear- 
ance of an allotment. And not only did 
Margaret live in -this place ; she also be- 
longed to it. When she opened the door 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 85 

she gazed at me with watering eyes, and 
in perplexity stroked her disordered hair 
with a floury hand. Her face was sallow 
with heat, and beads of perspiration glit- 
tered in the deep, dragging line between 
her nostrils and the corners of her mouth. 
She said: 

'*He 's home?'' 

I nodded. 

She pulled me inside and slammed the 
door. 

**Is he well?" she asked. 

** Quite," I answered. 

Her tense stare relaxed. She rubbed 
her hands on her overall and said: 

**You '11 excuse me. It 's the girl's day 
out. If you '11 step into the parlor — " 

So in her parlor I sat and told her 
how it was with Chris and how greatly 
he desired to see her. And as I spoke 
of his longing I turned my eyes away from 
her, because she was sitting on a sofa, up- 
holstered in velveteen of a sickish green, 



86 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

which was so low that her knees stuck up 
in front of her, and she had to clasp them 
with her seamed, floury hands. I could 
see that the skin of her face was damp. 
And my voice failed me as I looked round 
the room, because I saw just what Mar- 
garet had seen that evening fifteen years 
ago when she had laid her cheek to the 
parlor window at Monkey Island. There 
was the enlarged photograph of Mar- 
garet's mother over the mantelpiece, on 
the walls were the views of Tintern 
Abbey framed in red plush, between the 
rickety legs of the china cupboard was 
the sewing-machine, and tucked into the 
corner between my chair and the fender 
were a pair of carpet slippers. All her 
life long Margaret, who in her time had 
partaken of the supreme dignity of a re- 
quited love, had lived with men who 
wore carpet slippers in the house. I 
turned my eyes away again, and this time 
looked down the garden at the figure that 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 87 

was not so much digging as exhibiting his 
incapacity to deal with a spade. He was 
sneezing very frequently, and his sneezes 
made the unbuckled straps at the back 
of his waistcoat wag violently. I sup- 
posed him to be Mr. William Grey. 

I had finished the statement of our sad 
case, and I saw that though she had not 
moved, clasping her knees in a set, hideous 
attitude, the tears were rolling down her 
cheeks. 

*^0h, don't! Oh, don't!" I exclaimed, 
standing up. Her tear-stained immobility 
touched the heart. '*He 's not so bad; 
he '11 get quite well." 

**I know, I know," she said miserably. 
**I don't believe that anything bad could 
be allowed to happen to Chris for long. 
And I 'm sure," she said kindly, **you 're 
looking after him beautifully. But when 
a thing you had thought had ended fif- 
teen years ago starts all over again, and 
you 're very tired — " She drew a hand 



88 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

across her tears, her damp skin, her rough, 
bagging overall. **I 'm hot. I 've been 
baking. You can't get a girl nowadays 
that understands the baking.'' Her gaze 
became remote and tender, and she said 
in a m'anner that was at once argumenta- 
tive and narrative, as though she were 
telling the whole story to a neighbor over 
the garden wall: **I suppose I ought to 
say that he isn't right in his head, and 
that I 'm married, so we 'd better not 
meet; but, oh," she cried, and I felt as 
though, after much fumbling with damp 
matches and many doubts as to whether 
there was any oil in the wick, I had lit 
the lamp at last, *^I want to see him so! 
It 's wrong, I know it 's wrong, but I am 
so glad Chris wants to see me, too!" 

**You '11 do him good." I found my- 
self raising my voice to the pitch she had 
suddenly attained as though to keep her 
at it. ** Come now!" 

She dipped suddenly to compassion. 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 89 

*^But the young lady?" she asked tim- 
idly. **She was upset the last time. I 've 
often wondered if I did right in going. 
Even if Chris has forgotten, he '11 want to 
do what's right. He couldn't bear to 
hurt her.'' 

**That 's true," I said. *'You do know 
our Chris. He watches her out of the 
corner of his eye, even when he 's feeling 
at his worst, to see she isn't wincing. 
But she sent me here to-day." 

**0h!" cried Margaret, glowing, **she 
must have a lovely nature ! " 

I lost suddenly the thread of the con- 
versation. I could not talk about Kitty. 
She appeared to me at that moment a 
faceless figure with flounces, just as most 
of the servants at Baldry Court appear 
to me as faceless figures with caps and 
aprons. There were only two real peo- 
ple in the world, Chris and this woman 
whose personality was sounding through 
her squalor like a beautiful voice singing 



90 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

in a darkened room, and I was absorbed 
in a mental vision of them. You know 
how the saints and the prophets are de- 
picted in the steel engravings in old 
Bibles; so they were standing, in flowing 
white robes on rocks against a pitch-black 
sky, a strong light beating on their eyes 
upturned in ecstasy and their hand out- 
stretched to receive the spiritual blessing 
of which the fierce rays were an emana- 
tion. Into that rapt silence I desired to 
break, and I whispered irrelevantly, **0h, 
nothing, nothing is too good for Chris!'' 
while I said to myself, **If she really were 
like that, solemn and beatified!'' and my 
eyes returned to look despairingly on her 
ugliness. But she really was like that. 
She had responded to my irrelevant mur- 
mur of adoration by just such a solemn 
and beatified appearance as I had imag- 
ined. Her grave eyes were upturned, her 
worn hands lay palm upward on her knees, 
as though to receive the love of which her 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 91 

radiance was an emanation. And then, 
at a sound in the kitchen, she snatched 
my exaltation from me by suddenly turn- 
ing dull. 

**I think that 's Mr. Grey come in from 
his gardening. You 11 excuse me.*' 

Through the open door I heard a voice 
saying in a way which suggested that its 
production involved much agitation of a 
prominent Adam's apple: 

**Well, dear, seeing you had a friend, 
I thought I 'd better slip up and change 
my gardening trousers." I do not know 
what she said to him, but her voice was 
soft and comforting and occasionally girl- 
ish and interrupted by laughter, and I per- 
ceived from its sound that with charac- 
teristic gravity she had accepted it as her 
mission to keep loveliness and excitement 
alive in his life. 

*^An old friend of mine has been 
wounded,'' was the only phrase I heard; 
but when she drew him out into the gar- 



92 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

den under the window she had evidently 
explained the situation away, for he 
listened docilely as she said: *^I Ve made 
some rock-cakes for your tea. And if I 'm 
late for supper, there 's a dish of macaroni 
cheese you must put in the oven and a 
tin of tomatoes to eat with it. And there 
is a little rhubarb and shape." She told 
them off on her fingers, and then whisked 
him round and buckled the wagging straps 
at the back of his waistcoat. He was a 
lank man, with curly gray hairs gromng 
from every place where it is inadvisable 
that hairs should grow, — from the inside 
of his ears, from his nostrils, on the back 
of his hands, — but he looked pleased when 
she touched him, and he said in a devoted 
way: 

**Very well, dear. Don't worry about 
me. I '11 trot along after tea and have 
a game of draughts with Brown." 

She answered: 

* * Yes, dear. And now get on with those 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 93 

cabbages. You 're going to keep me in 
lovely cabbages, just as you did last year, 
won't you, darling f She linked arms 
with him and took him back to his digging. 
When she came back into the parlor 
again she was wearing that yellowish 
raincoat, that hat with hearse plumes 
nodding over its sticky straw, that gray 
alpaca skirt. I first defensively clenched 
my hands. It would have been such agony 
to the finger-tips to touch any part of her 
apparel. And then I thought of Chris, 
to whom a second before I had hoped to 
bring a serene comforter. I perceived 
clearly that that ecstatic woman lifting 
her eyes and her hands to the benediction 
of love was Margaret as she existed in 
eternity; but this was Margaret as she 
existed in time, as the fifteen years be- 
tween Monkey Island and this damp day 
in Ladysmith Road had irreparably made 
her. Well, I had promised to bring her 
to him. 



94 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

She said: 

**I 'm ready," and against that simple 
view of her condition I had no argument. 
But when she paused by the painted drain- 
pipe in the hall and peered under con- 
tracted brows for that unveracious tor- 
toiseshell handle, I said hastily: 

**0h, don't trouble about an umbrella." 

**I '11 maybe need it walking home," 
she pondered. 

**But the car will bring you back." 

^*0h, that will be lovely," she said, and 
laughed nervously, looking very plain. 
*^Do you know, I know the way we 're com- 
ing together is terrible, but I can't think of 
a meeting with Chris as anything but a 
kind of treat. I 've got a sort of party 
feeling now." 

As she held the gate open for me she 
looked back at the house. 

**It's a horrid little house, isn't it?" 
she asked. She evidently desired sanction 
for a long-suppressed discontent. 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 95 

^ ^ It is n 't very nice, ' ' I agreed. 

**Tliey put cows sometimes into the 
field at the back/' she went on, as if con- 
scientiously counting her blessings. **I 
like that; but otherwise it isn't much.'' 

**But it 's got a very pretty name," I 
said, laying my hand on the raised metal 
letters that spelled '' Mariposa" across the 
gate. 

**Ah, isn't it!" she exclaimed, with the 
smile of the inveterate romanticist. *^It 's 
Spanish, you know, for butterfly." 

Once we were in the automobile, she be- 
came a little sullen with shyness, because 
she felt herself so big and clumsy, her 
clothes so coarse, against the fine uphol- 
stery, the silver vase of Christmas roses, 
and all the deliberate delicacy of Kitty's 
car. She was afraid of the chauffeur, as 
the poor are always afraid of men-serv- 
ants, and ducked her head when he got out 
to start the car. To recall her to ease and 
beauty I told her that though Chris had 



96 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

told me all about their meeting, he knew 
nothing of their parting, and that I wished 
very much to hear what had happened. 

In a deep, embarrassed voice she began 
to tell me about Monkey Island. It was 
strange how both Chris and she spoke of 
it as though it were not a place, but a 
magic state which largely explained the 
actions performed in it. Strange, too, 
that both of them should describe meticu- 
lously the one white hawthorn that stood 
among the poplars by the ferry-side. I 
suppose a thing that one has looked at 
with some one one loves acquires forever 
after a special significance. She said that 
her father had gone there when she was 
fourteen. After Mrs. Arlington had been 
taken away by a swift and painful death 
the cheer of his Windsor hostelry had be- 
come intolerable to the man; he regarded 
the whole world as her grave, and the 
tipsy sergeants in scarlet, the carter cry- 
ing for a pint of four-half, and even the 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 97 

mares dipping their mild noses to the 
trough in the courtyard seemed to be de- 
filing it by their happy, simple appetites. 
So they went to Monkey Island, the utter 
difference of which was a healing, and 
settled down happily in its green silence. 
All the summer was lovely; quiet, kind 
people, schoolmasters who fished, men who 
wrote books, married couples who still 
loved solitude" used to come and stay in 
the bright little inn. And all the winter 
was lovely, too; her temperament could 
see an adventure in taking up the carpets 
because the Thames was coming into the 
coffee-room. That was the tale of her 
life for four years. With her head on 
one side, and the air of judging this ques- 
tion by the light of experience, she pro- 
nounced that she had then been happy. 

Then one April afternoon Chris landed 
at the island, and by the first clean, quick 
movement of tying up his boat made her 
his slave. I could imagine that it would 



98 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

be so. He was wonderful when lie was 
young; he possessed in great measure the 
loveliness of young men, which is like the 
loveliness of the spry foal or the sapling, 
but in him it was vexed into a serious and 
moving beauty by the inhabiting soul. 
When the sunlight lay on him, disclosing 
the gold hairs on his brown head, or when 
he was subject to any other physical pleas- 
ure, there was always reserve in his re- 
sponse to it. From his eyes, which, though 
gray, were somehow dark with specula- 
tion, one perceived that he was distracted 
by participation in some spiritual drama. 
To see him was to desire intimacy with 
him, so that one might intervene between 
this body, which was formed for happiness, 
and this soul, which cherished so deep a 
faith in tragedy. Well, she gave Chris 
ducks' eggs for tea. **No one ever had 
ducks' eggs like father did. It was his 
way of feeding them. It didn't pay, of 
course, but they were good." Before the 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 99 

afternoon was out he had snared them all 
with the silken net of his fine manners ; he 
had talked to father about his poultry and 
had walked about the runs and shown 
an intelligent interest, and then, as on 
many succeeding days, he had laid his 
charm at the girPs feet. **But I thought 
he must be some one royal, and when he 
kept on coming, I thought it must be for 
the ducks' eggs.'^ Then her damp, dull 
skin flushed suddenly to a warm glory, 
and she began to stammer. 

**I know all about that," I said quickly. 
I was more afraid that I should feel envy 
or any base passion in the presence of this 
woman than I have ever been of anything 
else in my life. **I want to hear how you 
came to part.'' 

^^Oh," she cried, ^4t was the silliest 
quarrel! We had known how we felt 
for just a week. Such a week! Lovely 
weather we had, and father hadn't no- 
ticed anything. I didn't want him to, 



100 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

because I thouglit father might want the 
marriage soon and think any delay a slight 
on me, and I knew we would have to wait. 
Eh! I can remember saying to myself, 
* Perhaps five years,' trying to make it as 
bad as could be so that if we could marry 
sooner it would be a lovely surprise. ' ' She 
repeated with soft irony, ** Perhaps five 
years ! ' ' 

**Well, then, one Thursday afternoon 
I 'd gone on the back-water with Bert 
Batchard, nephew to Mr. Batchard who 
keeps the inn at Surly Hall. I was laugh- 
ing out loud because he did row so funny! 
He 's a town chap, and he was handling 
those oars for all the world as though they 
were teaspoons. The old dinghy just sat 
on the water like a hen on its chicks and 
didn't move, and he so sure of himself! 
I just sat and laughed and laughed. Then 
all of a sudden, clang! clang! the bell at 
the ferry. And there was Chris, standing 
up there among the poplars, his brows 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 101 

straight and black, and not a smile on 
him. I felt very bad. We picked him 
up in the dinghy and took him across, and 
still he did n't smile. He and I got on the 
island, and Bert, who saw there was 
something wrong, said, ^*Well, I '11 toddle 
off." And there I was on the lawn with 
Chris, and he angry and somewhow miles 
away. I remember him saying, *Here am 
I coming to say good-by, because I must 
go away to-night, and I find you larking 
with that bounder.' And I said: *0 
Chris, I 've known Bert all my life through 
him coming to his uncle for the holidays, 
and we weren't larking. It was only 
that he couldn't row.' And he went on 
talking, and then it struck me he wasn't 
trusting me as he would trust a girl of his 
own class, and I told him so, and he went 
on being cruel. Oh, don't make me re- 
member the things we said to each other! 
It does n 't help. At last I said something 
awful, and he said: *Very well; I agree. 



102 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

I *11 go,' and he walked over to the boy, 
who was chopping wood, and got him to 
take him over in the punt. As he passed 
me he turned away his face. Well, that 's 
all.'' 

I had got the key at last. There had 
been a spring at Baldry Court fifteen years 
ago that was desolate for all that there 
was beautiful weather. Chris had lingered 
with Uncle Ambrose in his Thames-side 
rectory as he had never lingered before, 
and old Mr. Baldry was filling the house 
with a sense of hot, apoplectic misery. All 
day he was up in town at the office, and 
without explanation he had discontinued 
his noontide habit of ringing up his wife. 
All night he used to sit in the library 
looking over his papers and ledgers ; often 
in the mornings the housemaids would find 
him asleep across his desk, very red, yet 
looking dead. The men he brought home 
to dinner treated him with a kindness and 
consideration which were not the tributes 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 103 

that that victorious and trumpeting per- 
sonality was accustomed to exact, and in 
the course of conversation with them he 
dropped braggart hints of impending ruin 
which he would have found it humiliating 
to address to us directly. At last there 
came a morning when he said to Mrs. 
Baldry across the breakfast-table: *'I Ve 
sent for Chris. If the boy 's worth his 
salt — " It was an appalling admission, 
like the groan of an old ship as her tim- 
bers shiver, from a man who doubted the 
capacity of his son, as fathers always doubt 
the capacity of the children born of their 
old age. 

It was that evening, as I went down 
to see the new baby at the lodge, that I 
met Chris coming up the drive. Through 
the blue twilight his white face had had 
a drowned look. I remembered it well, 
because my surprise that he passed me 
without seeing me had made me perceive 
for the first time that he had never seen 



104 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

me at all save in the most cursory fash- 
ion. On the eye of his mind, I realized 
thenceforward, I had hardly impinged. 
That night he talked till late with his 
father, and in the morning he had started 
for Mexico to keep the mines going, to 
keep the firm's head above water and 
Baldry Court sleek and hospitable — to 
keep everything bright and splendid save 
only his youth, which ever after that was 
dulled by care. 

Something of this I told Margaret, 
to which she answered, *^0h, I know all 
that," and went on with her story. On 
Sunday, three days after their quarrel, 
Mr. AUington was found dead in his bed. 
^*I wanted Chris so badly; but he never 
came, he never wrote," and she fell into 
a lethargic disposition to sit all day and 
watch the Thames flow by, from which 
she was hardly roused by finding that her 
father had left her nothing save an income 
of twenty pounds a year from unrealizable 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 105 

stock. She negotiated the transfer of the 
lease of the inn to a publican, and, after 
exacting a promise from the new hostess 
that she would forward all letters that 
might come, embarked upon an increas- 
ingly unfortunate career as a mother's 
help. First she fell into the hands of 
a noble Irish family in reduced circum- 
stances, whose conduct in running away 
and leaving her in a Brighton hotel with 
her wages and her bill unpaid still dis- 
tressed and perplexed her. **Why did 
they do itr' she asked. **I liked them 
so. The baby was a darling, and Mrs. 
Murphy had such a nice way of speaking. 
But it almost makes one think evil of peo- 
ple when they do a thing like that. ' ' After 
two years of less sensational, but still un- 
easy, adventures, she had come upon a 
large and needy family called Watson 
who lived at Chiswick, and almost im- 
mediately Mr. William Grey, who was 
Mrs. Watson's brother, had begun a court- 



106 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

sMp that I suspected of consisting of an 
incessant whining up at her protective in- 
stinct. ^^Mr. Grey," she said softly, as 
though stating his chief aim to affec- 
tion, *^has never been very successful." 
And still no letter ever came. 

So, five years after she left Monkey 
Island, she married Mr. William Grey. 
Soon after their marriage he lost his job 
and was for some time out of work; later 
he developed a weak chest that needed 
constant attention. **But it all helped to 
pass the time," she said cheerfully and 
without irony. So it happened that it was 
not till two years after that she had the 
chance of revisiting Monkey Island. At 
first there was no money, and later there 
was the necessity of seeking the healthful 
breezes of Brighton or Bognor or South- 
end, which were the places in which Mr. 
Grey's chest oddly elected to thrive. And 
when these obstacles were removed, she 
was lethargic ; also she had heard that the 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 107 

inn was not being managed as it ought to 
be, and she could not have borne to see 
the green home of her youth defiled. But 
then there had come a time when she had 
been very much upset, — she glared a little 
wildly at me as she said this, as if she 
would faint if I asked her any questions, 
— and then she had suddenly become ob- 
sessed with a desire to see Monkey Island 
once more. 

^^Well, when we got to the ferry, Mr. 
Grey says, *But mercy, Margaret, there 's 
water all round it!' and I said, * Will- 
iam, that 's just it. ' ' ' They found that the 
island was clean and decorous again, for 
it had only recently changed hands. 
* * Father and daughter the new people are, 
just like me and dad, and Mr. Taylor 's 
something of dad's cut, too, but he comes 
from the North. But Miss Taylor 's 
much handsomer than I ever was ; a really 
big woman she is, and such lovely golden 
hair. They were very kind when I told 



108 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

them who I was; gave us duck and green 
peas for lunch and I did think of dad. 
They were nothing like as good as his 
duoks, but then I expect they paid. And 
then Miss Taylor took William out to look 
at the garden. I knew he didn't like 
it, for he 's always shy with a showy 
woman, and I was going after them 
when Mr. Taylor said: *Here, stop a 
minute. I Ve got something here that 
may interest you. Just come in here. He 
took me up to the roller desk in the ofi&ce, 
and out of the drawer he took twelve letters 
addressed to me in Chris's handwriting. 
**He was a kind man. He put me into 
a chair and called Miss Taylor in and 
told her to keep William out in the gar- 
den as long as possible. At last I said, 
*But Mrs. Hitchcock did say she 'd send 
my letters on.' And he said, *Mrs. Hitch- 
cock hadn't been here three weeks before 
she bolted with a bookie from Bray, and 
after that Hitchcock mixed his drinks and 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 109 

got careless.' He said they had found 
these stuffed into the desk." 

''And what was in them?" 

''For a long time I did not read them; 
I thought it was against my duty as a 
wife. But when I got that telegram say- 
ing he was wounded, I went up-stairs and 
read those letters. Oh, those letters!" 

She bowed her head and wept. 

As the car swung through the gates of 
Baldry Court she sat up and dried her 
eyes. She looked out at the strip of turf, 
so bright that one would think it wet, 
and lighted here and there -with snow- 
drops and scillas and crocuses, that runs 
between the drive and the tangle of silver 
birch and bramble and fern. There is no 
esthetic reason for that border; the com- 
mon outside looks lovelier where it fringes 
the road with dark gorse and rough amber 
grasses. Its use is purely philosophic; it 
proclaims that here we esteem only con- 
trolled beauty, that the wild will not have 



110 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

its way within our gates, that it must be 
made delicate and decorated into felicity. 
Surely, she must see that this was no 
place for beauty that had been not mel- 
lowed, but lacerated, by time, that no one 
accustomed to live here could help winc- 
ing at such external dinginess as hers. 
But instead she said: *^It 's a big place. 
Chris must have worked hard to keep all 
this up.'' The pity of this woman was 
like a flaming sword. No one had ever 
before pitied Chris for the magnificence 
of Baldry Court. It had been our pre- 
tense that by wearing costly clothes and 
organizing a costly life we had been the 
servants of his desire. But she revealed 
the truth that, although he did indeed de- 
sire a magnificent house, it was a house 
not built with hands. 

But that she was wise, that the angels 
would of a certainty be on her side, did 
not make her any the less physically offen- 
sive to our atmosphere. All my doubts 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 111 

as to the wisdom of my expedition revived 
in the little time we had to spend in the 
hall waiting for the tea which I had or- 
dered in the hope that it might help Mar- 
garet to compose her distressed face. She 
hovered with her back to the oak table, 
fumbling with her thread gloves, winking 
her tear-red eyes, tapping with her foot 
on the carpet, throwing her weight from 
one leg to the other, and I constantly con- 
trasted her appearance by some clumsiness 
with the new acquisition of Kitty 's decora- 
tive genius that stood so close behind her 
on the table that I was afraid it might be 
upset by one of her spasmodic movements. 
This was a shallow black bowl in the 
center of which crouched on all fours a 
white, naked nymph, her small head in- 
tently drooped to the white flowers that 
floated on the black waters all around her. 
Beside the pure black of the bowl her 
rusty plumes looked horrible; beside that 
white nymph, eternally innocent of all 



112 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

but the contemplation of beauty, her 
opaque skin and her suffering were offen- 
sive; beside its air of being the coolly 
conceived and leisurely executed produc- 
tion of a hand and brain lifted by their 
rare quality to the service of the not ab- 
solutely necessary, her appearance of hav- 
ing only for the moment ceased to cope 
with a vexed and needy environment 
struck me as a cancerous blot on the fair 
world. Perhaps it was absurd to pay at- 
tention to this indictment of a noble 
woman by a potter's toy, but that toy hap- 
pened to be also a little image of Chris's 
conception of women. Exquisite we were 
according to our equipment, unflushed by 
appetite or passion, even noble passion, 
our small heads bent intently on the white 
flowers of luxury floating on the black 
waters of life, he had known none other 
than us. With such a mental habit a man 
could not help but wince at Margaret. I 
drank my tea very slowly because I pre- 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 113 

visioned what must happen in the next 
five minutes. Down there by the pond 
he would turn at the sound of those heavy 
boots on the path, and with one glance 
he would assess the age of her, the rubbed 
surface of her, the torn fine texture, and 
he would show to her squalid mask just 
such a blank face as he had shown to 
Kitty's piteous mask the night before. 
Although I had a gift for self-pity, I knew 
her case would then be worse than mine; 
for it would be worse to see, as she would 
see, the ardor in his eyes give place to 
kindliness than never to have ardor there. 
He would hesitate; she would make one 
of her harassed gestures, and trail away 
with that wet, patient look which was 
her special line. He would go back to 
his boyish sport with the skiff; I hoped 
the brown waters would not seem too 
kind. She would go back to Mariposa, 
sit on her bed, and read those letters. 
**And now,'' she said brightly as I put 



114 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

down my cup, ^'may I see Chris?'' She 
had not a doubt of the enterprise. 

I took her into the drawing-room and 
opened one of the French windows. 

**Go past the cedars to the pond," I told 
her. **He is rowing there." 

*'That is nice," she said. **He always 
looks so lovely in a boat. ' ' 

I called after her, trying to hint the pos- 
sibility of a panic breakdown to their 
meeting : 

*^You '11 find he 's altered—" 

She cried gleefully : 

**0h, I shall know him." 

As I went up-stairs I became aware 
that I was near to a bodily collapse; I 
suppose the truth is that I was physically 
so jealous of Margaret that it was making 
me ill. But suddenly, like a tired person 
dropping a weight that they know to be 
precious, but cannot carry for another 
minute, my mind refused to consider the 
situation any longer and turned to the 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 115 

perception of material things. I leaned 
over the balustrade and looked down at 
the fineness of the hall: the deliberate 
figure of the nymph in her circle of black 
waters, the clear pink-and- white of Kitty's 
chintz, the limpid surface of the oak, the 
broken burning of all the gay reflected 
colors in the paneled walls. I said to 
myself, **If everything else goes, there is 
always this to fall back on," and I went 
on, pleased that I was wearing delicate 
stuffs and that I had a smooth skin, 
pleased that the walls of the corridor were 
so soft a twilight blue, pleased that 
through a far-off open door there came a 
stream of light that made the carpet blaze 
its stronger blue. And when I saw that 
it was the nursery door that was open, 
and that Kitty was sitting in Nanny's big 
chair by the window, I did not care about 
the peaked face she lifted, its fairness 
palely gilt by the March sunlight, or the 
tremendous implications of the fact that 



116 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

she had come to her dead child's nursery 
although she had not washed her hair. I 
said sternly, because she had forgotten 
that we lived in the impregnable fort of 
a gracious life: 

**0 Kitty, that poor battered thing out- 
side !'' 

She stared so grimly out into the gar- 
den that my eyes followed her stare. 

It was one of those draggled days, com- 
mon at the end of March when a garden 
looks at its worst. The wind that was 
rolling up to check a show of sunshine 
had taken away the cedar's dignity of 
solid blue shade, had set the black firs 
beating their arms together, and had filled 
the sky with glaring gray clouds that 
dimmed the brilliance of the crocuses. It 
was to give gardens a point on days such 
as these, when the planned climax of this 
flower-bed and that stately tree goes for 
nothing, that the old gardeners raised 
statues in their lawns and walks, large 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 117 

things with a subject, mossy Tritons or 
nymphs with an urn, that held the eye. 
Even so in this unrestf ul garden one 's eyes 
lay on the figure in the yellow raincoat 
that was standing still in the middle of 
the lawn. 

How her near presence had been known 
by Chris I do not understand, but there 
he was, running across the lawn as night 
after night I had seen him in my dreams 
running across No-Man 's-Land. I knew 
that so he would close his eyes as he ran; 
I knew that so he would pitch on his 
knees when he reached safety. I assumed 
naturally that at Margaret's feet lay 
safety even before I saw her arms brace 
him under the armpits with a gesture that 
was not passionate, but rather the move- 
ment of one carrying a wounded man 
from under fire. But even when she had 
raised his head to the level of her lips, 
the central issue was not decided. I cov- 
ered my eyes and said aloud, * * In a minute 



118 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

he will see her face, her hands." But al- 
though it was a long time before I looked 
again, they were still clinging breast to 
breast. It was as though her embrace fed 
him, he looked so strong as he broke away. 
They stood with clasped hands looking 
at one another. They looked straight, 
they looked delightedly! And then, as if 
resuming a conversation tiresomely in- 
terrupted by some social obligation, they 
drew together again, and passed under 
the tossing branches of the cedar to the 
wood beyond. I reflected, while Kitty 
shrilly wept, how entirely right Chris 
had been in his assertion that to lovers in- 
numerable things do not matter. 



CHAPTER V 

AFTER the automobile had taken Mar- 
garet away Chris came to us as we 
sat in the drawing-room, and, after stand- 
ing for a while in the glow of the fire, hesi- 
tantly said: 

*^I want to tell you that I know it is 
all right. Margaret has explained to 
me.'^ 

Kitty crumpled her sewing into a white 
ball. 

*'You mean, I suppose, that you know 
I 'm your wife. I ^m pleased that you 
describe that as knowing *it 's all right,' 
and grateful that you have accepted it at 
last — on Margaret's authority. This is 
an occasion that would make any wife 
proud." 

Her irony was as faintly acrid as a 

119 



120 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

caraway-seed, and never afterward did 
she reach even that low pitch of violence; 
for from that mild, forward droop of the 
head with which he received the mental 
lunge she realized suddenly that this was 
no pretense and that something as impas- 
sable as death lay between them. There- 
after his proceedings evoked no comment 
but suffering. There was nothing to say 
when all day, save for those hours of the 
afternoon that Margaret spent with him, 
he sat like a blind man waiting for his 
darkness to lift. There was nothing to 
say when he did not seem to see our flow- 
ers, yet kept till they rotted the daffodils 
which Margaret brought from the garden 
that looked like an allotment. 

So Kitty lay about like a broken doll, 
face downward on a sofa, with one limp 
arm dangling to the floor, or protruding 
stiff feet in fantastic slippers from the 
end of her curtained bed; and I tried to 
make my permanent wear that mood 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 121 

which had mitigated the end of my jour- 
ney with Margaret — a mood of intense 
perception in which my strained mind set- 
tled on every vivid object that came under 
my eyes and tried to identify myself with 
its brightness and its lack of human pas- 
sion. This does not mean that I passed 
my day in a state of joyous appreciation; 
it means that many times in the lanes of 
Harrowweald I have stood for long look- 
ing up at a fine tracery of bare boughs 
against the hard, high spring sky while 
the cold wind rushed through my skirts 
and chilled me to the bone, because I was 
afraid that when I moved my body and 
my attention I might begin to think. In- 
deed, grief is not the clear melancholy 
the young believe it. It is like a siege in 
a tropical city. The skin dries and the 
throat parches as though one were living 
in the heat of the desert; water and wine 
taste warm in the mouth, and food is of 
the substance of the sand; one snarls at 



122 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

one 's company ; thoughts prick one through 
sleep like mosquitos. 

A week after my journey to Weald- 
stone I went to Kitty to ask her to come 
for a walk with me and found her 
stretched on her pillows, holding a review 
of her underclothing. She refused bit- 
terly and added: 

*^Be back early. Eemember Dr. Gil- 
bert Anderson is coming at half -past four. 
He 's our last hope. And tell that woman 
she must see him. He says he wants to 
see everybody concerned." She continued 
to look wanly at the frail, luminous silks 
her maid brought her as a speculator who 
had cornered an article for which there 
had been no demand might look at his 
damnably numerous, damnably unprofit- 
able freights. So I went out alone into 
a soft day, with the dispelled winter lurk- 
ing above in high dark clouds, under 
which there ran quick, fresh currents of 
air and broken shafts of insistent sunshine 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 123 

that spread a gray clarity of light in which 
every color showed sharp and strong. On 
the breast that Harrowweald turns to the 
south they had set a lambing-yard. The 
pale-lavender hurdles and gold-strewn 
straw were new gay notes on the opaque 
winter green of the slope, and the appre- 
hensive bleatings of the ewes wound about 
the hill like a river of sound as they were 
driven up a lane hidden by the hedge. 
The lines of bare elms darkening the 
plains below made it seem as though the 
tide of winter had fallen and left this 
bare and sparkling in the spring. I liked 
it so much that I opened the gate and 
went and sat down on a tree which had 
been torn up by the roots in the great gale 
last year, but had not yet resigned itself 
to death, and was bravely decking its 
boughs with purple elm-flowers. 

That pleased me, too, and I wished I 
had some one with me to enjoy this artless 
little show of the new year. I had not 



124 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

really wanted Kitty; the companions I 
needed were Chris and Margaret. Chris 
would have talked, as he loved to do when 
he looked at leisure on a broad valley, 
about ideas which he had to exclude from 
his ordinary hours lest they should break 
the power of business over his mind, and 
Margaret would have gravely watched 
the argument from the shadow of her 
broad hat to see that it kept true, like a 
housewife watching a saucepan of milk 
lest it should boil over. They were natu- 
rally my friends, these gentle, speculative 
people. 

Then suddenly I was stunned with 
jealousy. It was not their love for each 
other that caused me such agony at that 
moment; it was the thought of the things 
their eyes had rested upon together. I 
imagined that white hawthorn among the 
poplars by the ferry on which they had 
looked fifteen years ago at Monkey Island, 
and it was more than I could bear. I 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 125 

thought how even now they might be ex- 
claiming at the green smoke of the first 
buds on the brown undergrowth by the 
pond, and at that I slid off the tree-trunk 
and began walking very quickly down the 
hill. The red cows drank from the pond 
cupped by the willow-roots; a raw-boned 
stallion danced clumsily because warmth 
was running through the ground. I found 
a stream in the fields and followed it till 
it became a shining dike embanked with 
glowing green and gold mosses in the 
midst of woods; and the sight of those 
things was no sort of joy, because my 
vision was solitary. I wanted to end my 
desperation by leaping from a height, and 
I climbed on a knoll and flung myself face 
downward on the dead leaves below. 

I was now utterly cut off from Chris. 
Before, when I looked at him, I knew an 
instant ease in the sight of the short golden 
down on his cheeks, the ridge of bronze 
flesh above his thick, fair eyebrows. But 



126 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

now I was too busy reassuring him by 
showing a steady, undistorted profile 
crowned by a neat, proud sweep of hair in- 
stead of the tear-darkened mask he al- 
ways feared ever to have enough vitality 
left over to enjoy his presence. I spoke 
in a calm voice full from the chest, quite 
unfluted with agony; I read ** Country 
Life'* with ponderous interest; I kept my 
hands, which I desired to wring, in doe- 
skin gloves for most of the day; I played 
with the dogs a great deal and wore my 
thickest tweeds; I pretended that the 
slight heaviness of my features is a cor- 
rect indication of my temperament. The 
only occasion when I could safely let the 
sense of him saturate me as it used was 
when I met Margaret in the hall as she 
came or went. She was very different 
now; she had ^ little smile in her eyes, as 
though she were listening to a familiar air 
played far away. Her awkwardness 
seemed indecision as to whether she should 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 127 

walk or dance to that distant music; her 
shabbiness was no more repulsive than the 
untidiness of a child who had been so eager 
to get to the party that it has not let its 
nurse finish fastening its frock. Always 
she extended a hand in an unbuttoned 
black thread glove and said, *^It 's another 
fine day again,'' or diffidently, as Kitty 
continued to withhold her presence, *^I 
hope Mrs. Baldry is keeping well. ' ' Then, 
as our hands touched, he was with us, in- 
voked by our common adoration. I felt 
his rough male texture and saw the clear 
warmth of his brown and gold coloring; 
I thought of him with the passion of exile. 
To Margaret it was a call, and she moved 
past me to the garden, holding her hands 
in front of her as though she bore invisible 
gifts, and pausing on the step of the 
French window to smile to herself, as if 
in her heart she turned over the precious 
thought: **He is here. This garden 
holds him.'' My moment, my small sole 



128 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

subsistence, ended in a feeling of jealousy 
us ugly and unmental as sickness. This 
was the saddest spring. 

Nothing could mitigate the harshness of 
our rejection. You may think we were 
attaching an altogether fictitious impor- 
tance to what was merely the delusion of a 
madman. But every minute of the day, 
particularly at those trying times when he 
strolled about the house and grounds with 
the doctors, smiling courteously, but with- 
out joy, and answering their questions 
with the crisp politeness of a man shaking 
off an inquisitive commercial traveler in 
a hotel smoking-room, it became plain that 
if madness means a liability to wild error 
about the world Chris was not mad. It 
was our peculiar shame that he had re- 
jected us when he had attained to some- 
thing saner than sanity. His very loss of 
memory was a triumph over the limitations 
of language which prevent the mass of men 
from making explicit statements about 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 129 

their spiritual relationships. If he had 
said to Kitty and me, *^I do not know 
you/' we would have gaped; if he had 
expanded his meaning and said, **You are 
nothing to me ; my heart is separate from 
your hearts,'' we would have wept at an 
unkindness he had not intended. But by 
the blankness of those eyes which saw me 
only as a disregarded playmate and Kitty 
not at all save as a stranger who had 
somehow become a decorative presence in 
his home and the orderer of his meals he 
let us know completely where we were. 
Even though I lay weeping at it on the 
dead leaves I was sensible of the bitter rap- 
ture which attends the discovery of any 
truth. I felt, indeed, a cold intellectual 
pride in his refusal to remember his pros- 
perous maturity and his determined dwell- 
ing in the time of his first love, for it 
showed him so much saner than the rest of 
us, who take life as it comes, loaded with 
the unessential and the irritating. I was 



130 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

even willing to admit that this choice of 
what was to him reality out of all the ap- 
pearances so copiously presented by the 
world, this adroit recovery of the dropped 
pearl of beauty, was the act of genius I 
had always expected from him. But that 
did not make less agonizing this exclusion 
from his life. 

I could not think clearly about it. I 
suppose that the subject of our tragedy, 
written in spiritual terms, was that in 
Kitty he had turned from the type of 
woman that makes the body conqueror of 
the soul and in me the type that mediates 
between the soul and the body and makes 
them run even and unhasty like a well- 
matched pair of carriage horses, and had 
given himself to a woman whose bleak 
habit it was to champion the soul against 
the body. But I saw it just as a fantastic 
act of cruelty that I could think of only 
as a conjunction of calamitous images. I 
think of it happening somewhere behind 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 131 

the front, at the end of a straight road that 
runs by a line of ragged poplars between 
rnud flats made steel-bright with floods 
pitted by the soft, slow rain. There, past 
a church that lacks its tower, stand a 
score of houses, each hideous with patches 
of bare bricks that show like sores through 
the ripped-off plaster and uncovered raf- 
ters that stick out like broken bones. 
There are people still living here. A 
slouchy woman sits at the door of a filthy 
cottage, counting some dirty linen and wav- 
ing her bare arm at some passing soldiers. 
And at another house there is a general 
store with strings of orange onions and 
bunches of herbs hanging from the roof, a 
brown gloom rich with garlic and humming 
with the flies that live all the year round 
in French village shops, a black cat rubbing 
her sleepiness against the lintel. It is in 
there that Chris is standing, facing across 
the counter an old man in a blouse, with a 
scar running white into the gray thickets 



132 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

of his beard, an old man with a smile at 
once lewd and benevolent, repulsive with 
dirt and yet magnificent by reason of the 
Olympian structure of his body. I think 
he is the soul of the universe, equally cog- 
nizant and disregardful of every living 
thing, to whom I am not more dear than 
the bare-armed slouchy woman at the 
neighboring door. And Chris is leaning 
on the counter, his eyes glazed. (This is 
his spirit; his body lies out there in the 
drizzle, at the other end of the road.) He 
is looking down on the two crystal balls 
that the old man's foul, strong hands have 
rolled across to him. In one he sees Mar- 
garet, not in her raincoat and her nodding 
plumes, but as she is transfigured in the 
light of eternity. Long he looks there; 
then drops a glance to the other, just long 
enough to see that in its depths Kitty and 
I walk in bright dresses through our glow- 
ing gardens. We had suffered no trans- 
figuration, for we are as we are, and 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 133 

there is nothing more to us. The whole 
truth about us lies in our material seem- 
ing. He sighs a deep sigh of delight and 
puts out his hand to the ball where Mar- 
garet shines. His sleeve catches the other 
one and sends it down to crash in a thou- 
sand pieces on the floor. The old man's 
smile continues to be lewd and benevolent ; 
he is still not more interested in me than 
in the bare-armed woman. Chris is 
wholly inclosed in his intentness on his 
chosen crystal. No one weeps for this 
shattering of our world. 

I stirred on the dead leaves as though I 
had really heard the breaking of the globe 
and cried out, ** Gilbert Anderson, Gilbert 
Anderson must cure him. ' ' Heaven knows 
that I had no reason for faith in any 
doctor, for during the last week so many 
of them, as sleek as seals with their neatly 
brushed hair and their frock-coats, had 
stood round Chris and looked at him with 
the consequenceless deliberation of a 



134 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

plumber. Their most successful enter- 
prise had been his futile hypnotism. He 
had submitted to it as a good-natured man 
submits to being blindfolded at a chil- 
dren's party, and under its influence had 
recovered his memory and his middle-aged 
personality, had talked of Kitty with the 
humorous tenderness of the English 
husband, and had looked possessively about 
him. But as his mind came out of the 
control he exposed their lie that they were 
dealing with a mere breakdown of the 
normal process by pushing away this 
knowledge and turning to them the blank 
wall, all the blanker because it was un- 
conscious, of his resolution not to know. 
I had accepted that it would always be 
so. But at that moment I had so great 
a need to throw off my mood of despair, 
so insupportably loaded with all the fan- 
tastic images to which my fevered mind 
transmuted the facts of our tragedy, that 
I filled myself with a gasping, urgent faith 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 135 

in this new doctor. I jumped up and 
pushed through the brambles to the hedge 
that divided the preserves in which I 
was trespassing from our own woods, 
breathless because I had let it go past four 
and I had still to find Chris and Margaret 
for the doctor's visit at the half -hour. 

There had been a hardening of the light 
while I slept that made the dear, familiar 
woods rich and sinister, and to the eye, 
tropical. The jewel-bright buds on the 
soot-black boughs, the blue valley dis- 
tances, smudged here and there with the 
pink enamel of villa-roofs, and seen be- 
tween the black-and-white intricacies of 
the birch-trunks and the luminous gray 
pillars of the beeches, hurt my wet eyes as 
might beauty blazing under an equatorial 
sun. There was a tropical sense of dan- 
ger, too, for I walked as apprehensively 
as though a snake coiled under every leaf, 
because I feared to come on them when 
he was speaking to her without looking at 



136 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

her or thinking in silence while he played 
with her hand. Embraces do not matter; 
they merely indicate the will to love, and 
may as well be followed by defeat as vic- 
tory. But disregard means that now 
there needs to be no straining of the eyes, 
no stretching forth of the hands, no press- 
ing of the lips, because theirs is such a 
union that they are no longer aware of the 
division of their flesh. I know it must be 
so ; a lonely life gives one opportunities of 
thinking these things out. I could not 
have borne to see signs of how he had 
achieved this intimacy with the woman 
whom a sudden widening of the down- 
ward vista showed as she leaned her bent 
back, ridged by her cheap stays, against a 
birch that some special skill of our for- 
ester had made wonderful for its straight 
slenderness. Against the clear colors of 
the bright bare wood her yellow raincoat 
made a muddy patch, and as a dead bough 
dropped near her she made a squalid dodg- 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 137 

ing movement like a hen. She was not so 
much a person as an implication of dreary- 
poverty, like an open door in a mean house 
that lets out the smell of cooking cabbage 
and the screams of children. Doubtlessly 
he sat somewhere close to her, lumpishly 
content. I thought distractedly how nec- 
essary it was that Gilbert Anderson should 
cure him, and tried to shout to her, but 
found my throat full of sobs. So I broke 
my way down through the fern and bram- 
ble and stood level with them, though still 
divided by some yards of broken ground. 

It was not utter dullness not to have 
anticipated the beauty that I saw. No 
one could have told. They had taken the 
mackintosh rug out of the dinghy and 
spread it on this little space of clear grass, 
I think so that they could look at a scatter- 
ing of early primroses in a pool of white 
anemones at an oak-tree's foot. She had 
run her hands over the rug so that it lay 
quite smooth and comfortable under him 



138 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

when at last he felt drowsy and turned on 
his side to sleep. He lay there in the con- 
fiding relaxation of a sleeping child, his 
hands unclenched, and his head thrown 
back so that the hare throat showed de- 
fenselessly. Now he was asleep and his 
face undarkened by thought, one saw how 
very fair he really was. And she, her 
mournfully vigilant face pinkened by the 
cold river of air sent by the advancing 
evening through the screen of rusted-gold 
bracken behind her, was sitting by him, 
just watching. 

I have often seen people grouped like 
that on the common outside our gates on 
Bank holidays. Most often the man has 
a handkerchief over his face to shade him 
from the sun, and the woman squats be- 
side him and peers through the under- 
growth to see that the children come to no 
harm as they play. It has sometimes 
seemed to me that there was a significance 
about it. You know when one goes into 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 139 

the damp, odorous coolness of a diurch in 
a Catholic country and sees the kneeling 
worshipers, their bodies bent stiffly and 
reluctantly, and yet with abandonment as 
though to represent the inevitable bending 
of the will to a purpose outside the in- 
dividual person, or when under any sky 
one sees a mother with her child in her 
arms, something turns in one's heart like 
a sword, and one says to oneself, **If hu- 
manity forgets these attitudes there is an 
end to the world." But people like me, 
who are not artists, are never sure about 
people they don't know. So it was not 
until now, when it happened to my 
friends, when it was my dear Chris and 
my dear Margaret who sat thus englobed 
in peace as in a crystal sphere, that I 
knew it was the most significant, as it was 
the loveliest, attitude in the world. It 
means that the woman has gathered the 
soul of the man into her soul and is keep- 
ing it warm in love and peace so that his 



140 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

body can rest quiet for a little time. That 
is a great thing for a woman to do. I 
know there are things at least as great for 
those women whose independent spirits 
can ride fearlessly and with interest out- 
side the home park of their personal re- 
lationships, but independence is not the oc- 
cupation of most of us. What we desire 
is greatness such as this, which had given 
sleep to the beloved. I had known that 
he was having bad nights at Baldry Court 
in that new room with the jade-green 
painted walls and the lapis-lazuli fireplace, 
which he found with surprise to be his in- 
stead of the remembered little room with 
the fishing-rods; but I had not been able 
to do anything about it. 

It was not fair that by the exercise of a 
generosity which seemed as fortuitous a 
possession as a beautiful voice a woman 
should be able to do such wonderful things 
for a man. For sleep was the least of her 
gifts to him. What she had done in lead- 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 141 

ing him into the quiet magic circle out of 
our life, out of the splendid house which 
was not so much a house as a vast piece of 
space partitioned off from the universe and 
decorated partly for beauty and partly to 
make our privacy more insolent, out of 
the garden where the flowers took thought 
as to how they should grow and the wood 
made as formal as a pillared aisle by 
forestry, may be judged from my anguish 
in being left there alone. Indeed she had 
been generous to us all, for at her touch 
our lives had at last fallen into a pattern ; 
she was the sober thread the interweaving 
of which with our scattered magnificences 
had somewhat achieved the design that 
otherwise would not appear. Perhaps 
even her dinginess was part of her gener- 
osity, for in order to fit into the pattern 
one has sometimes to forego something of 
one's individual beauty. That is why 
women like us do not wear such obviously 
lovely dresses as cocottes, but clothe our- 



142 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

selves in garments that by their slight 
neglect of the possibilities of beauty de- 
clare that there are such things as thrift 
and restraint and care for the future. 
And so I could believe of Margaret that 
her determined dwelling in places where 
there was not enough of anything, her 
continued exposure of herself to the grime 
of squalid living, was unconsciously de- 
liberate. The deep internal thing that had 
guided Chris to forgetfulness had guided 
her to poverty, so that when the time came 
for her meeting with her lover there 
should be not one intimation of the beauty 
of suave flesh to distract him from the 
message of her soul. I looked upward at 
this supreme act of sacrifice and glowed at 
her private gift to me. My sleep, though 
short, was now dreamless. No more did I 
see his body rotting into union with that 
brown texture of corruption which is No- 
Man 's-Land; no more did I see him slip- 
ping softly down the parapet into the 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 143 

trench ; no more did I hear voices talking in 
a void: *^Help me, old man; I Ve got no 
legs — " **I can't, old man; I Ve got no 
hands. ' ' They could not take him back to 
the army as he was. Only that morning 
as I went through the library he had raised 
an appalled face from the pages of a his- 
tory of the war. 

** Jenny, it can't be true that they did 
that to Belgium! Those funny, quiet, 
stingy people!" And his soldierly knowl- 
edge was as deeply buried as this memory 
of that awful August. While her spell 
endured they could not send him back 
into the hell of war. This wonderful, 
kind woman held his body as safely as she 
held his soul. 

I was so grateful that I was forced to 
go and sit down on the rug beside her. It 
was an intrusion, but I wanted to be near 
her. She did not look surprised when she 
turned to me her puckered brows, but 
smiled through the ugly fringe of vagrant 



144 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

hairs the weather had plucked from under 
the hard rim of her hat. It was part of 
her loveliness that even if she did not 
understand an act she could accept it. 

Presently she leaned over to me across 
his body and whispered : 

*^He 's not cold. I put the overcoat on 
him as soon as he was fairly off. I Ve just 
felt his hands, and they 're as warm as 
toast." If I had whispered like that I 
would have wakened him. 

Soon he stirred, groped for her hand, 
and lay with his cheek against the rough 
palm. He was awake, but liked to lie so. 

In a little she shook her hand away and 
said: 

**6et up and run along to the house and 
have some hot tea. You '11 catch your 
death lying out here. ' ' 

He caught her hand again. It was 
evident that for some reason the moment 
was charged with ecstasy for them both. 

It seemed as though there was a softer 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 145 

air in this small clearing than anywhere 
else in the world. I stood up, with my 
back against a birch and said negligently, 
knowing now that nothing could really 
threaten them : 

** There is a doctor coming at half -past 
four who wants to see you both. ' ' 

It cast no shadow on their serenity. He 
smiled upward, still lying on his back, 
and hailed me, ** Hallo, Jenny.'' But she 
made him get up and help her to fold the 
rug. 

^*It 's not right to keep a doctor waiting 
in these times," she declared, **so over- 
worked they are, poor men, since the war. ' ' 
As I led the way up through the woods 
to the house I heard her prove her point 
by an illustrative anecdote about some- 
thing that had happened down her road. 
I heard, too, their footsteps come to a 
halt for a space. I think her gray eyes had 
looked at him so sweetly that he had been 
constrained to take her in his arms. 



CHAPTEE VI 

1FELT, I remember with the little perk 
of self-approbation with which one re- 
members any sort of accurate premonition 
even if its fulfilment means disaster, a cold 
hand close round my heart as we turned 
the corner of the house and came on Dr. 
Gilbert Anderson. I was startled, to be- 
gin with, by his unmedical appearance. He 
was a little man with winking blue eyes, a 
flushed and crumpled forehead, a little 
gray mustache that gave him the profile 
of an amiable cat, and a lively taste in 
spotted ties, and he lacked that appetite- 
less look which is affected by distinguished 
practitioners. He was at once more com- 
ical and more suggestive of power than any 
other doctor I had ever seen, and this dif- 
ference was emphasized by his unexpefcted 

146 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 147 

occupation. A tennis-ball which he had 
discovered somewhere had roused his 
sporting instincts, and he was trying at 
what range it was possible to kick it be- 
tween two large stones which he had placed 
close together in front of the steps up to 
the house. It was his chubby absorption 
in this amusement which accounted for his 
first moment of embarrassment. 

** Nobody about in there; we profes- 
sional men get so little fresh air," he said 
bluffly, and blew his nose in a very large 
handkerchief, from the folds of which 
he emerged with perfect self-possession. 
*^You,'' he said to Chris, with a naive 
adoption of the detective tone, *^are the 
patient." He rolled his blue eye on me, 
took a good look, and, as he realized I 
did not matter, shook off the unnecessary 
impression like a dog coming out of water. 
He faced Margaret as though she were 
the nurse in charge of the case and gave 
her a brisk little nod. *^You 're Mrs. 



148 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

Grey. I shall want to talk to you later. 
Meantime — ^this man. I '11 come back." 
He indicated by a windmill gesture that 
we should go into the house, and swung 
off with Chris. 

She obeyed; that sort of woman always 
does what the doctor orders. But I de- 
layed for a moment to stare after this 
singular specialist, to sidetrack my fore- 
boding by pronouncing him a bounder, to 
wish, as my foreboding persisted, that like 
a servant I could give notice because there 
was ** always something happening in the 
house." 

Then, as the obedient figure at the top 
of the stairs was plainly shivering under 
its shoddy clothes in the rising wind that 
was polishing the end of the afternoon to 
brightness, I hastened to lead her into the 
hall. We stood about uneasily in its 
gloaming. Margaret looked round her 
and said in a voice flattened by the de- 
spondency she evidently shared with me: 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 149 

**It is nice to have everytMng ready 
that people can want and everything 
in its place. I used to do it at Monkey 
Island Inn. It was not grand like this, 
of course, but our visitors always came 
back a second time.'' Abstractedly and 
yet with joy she fingered the fine work of 
the tgCble-leg. 

There was a noise above us like the flut- 
tering of doves. Kitty was coming down- 
stairs in a white serge dress against which 
her hands were rosy; a woman with such 
lovely little hands never needed to wear 
flowers. By her kind of physical dis- 
cipline she had reduced her grief to no 
more than a slight darkening under the 
eyes, and for this moment she was glow- 
ing. I knew it was because she was going 
to meet a new man and anticipated the 
kindling of admiration in his eyes, and I 
smiled, contrasting her probable pre- 
figuring of Dr. Anderson with the amiable 
rotundity we had just encountered. Not 



150 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

that it would have made any difference if 
she had seen him. Beautiful women of her 
type lose, in this matter of admiration 
alone, their otherwise tremendous sense of 
class distinction ; they are obscurely aware 
that it is their civilizing mission to flash 
the jewel of their beauty before all men, 
so that they shall desire it and work to get 
the wealth to buy it, and thus be seduced 
by a present appetite to a tilling of the 
earth that serves the future. There is, you 
know, really room for all of us; we each 
have our peculiar use. 

**The doctor ^s talking to Chris out- 
side,'' I said. 

* * Ah, ' ' breathed Kitty. I found, though 
the occasion was a little grim, some en- 
tertainment in the two women's faces, so 
mutually intent, so differently fair, the 
one a polished surface that reflected light, 
like a mirror hung opposite a window, the 
other a lamp grimed by the smoke of care- 
less use, but still giving out radiance from 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 151 

its burning oil. Margaret was smiling 
wonderingly up at this prettiness, but 
Kitty seemed to be doing some brain- 
work. 

*^How do you do, Mrs. GreyT' she said, 
suddenly shaking out her cordiality as one 
shakes out a fan. ^*It 's very kind of you. 
Won't you go up-stairs and take off your 
things r' 

*^No, thank you,'' answered Marga- 
ret, shyly, ^*I shall have to go away so 
soon. ' ' 

**Ah, do!" begged Kitty, prettily. 

It was, of course, that she did not want 
Margaret to meet the specialist in those 
awful clothes; but I did not darken the 
situation by explaining that this disaster 
had already happened. Instead, I turned 
to Margaret an expression which conveyed 
that this was an act of hospitality the re- 
fusal of which we would find wounding, 
and to that she yielded, as I knew she 
would. She followed me up-stairs and 



152 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

along the corridors very slowly, like a 
child paddling in a summer sea. She en- 
joyed the feeling of the thick carpet under- 
foot ; she looked lingeringly at the pictures 
on the wall; occasionally she put a finger 
to touch a vase as if by that she made its 
preciousness more her own. Her spirit, 
I could see, was as deeply concerned about 
Chris as was mine ; but she had such faith 
in life that she retained serenity enough to 
enjoy what beauty she came across in her 
period of waiting. Even her enjoyment 
was indirectly generous. When she came 
into my room the backward flinging of her 
head and her deep **0h!'' recalled to me 
what I had long forgotten, how fine were 
its proportions, how clever the grooved 
arch above the window, how like the eve- 
ning sky my blue curtains. 

**And the lovely things you have on your 
dressing-table," she commented. **You 
must have very good taste." The charity 
that changed my riches to a merit! As I 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 153 

helped her to take off her raincoat and re- 
flected that Kitty would not be pleased 
when she saw that the removal of the gar- 
ment disclosed a purple blouse of stuff 
called moirette that servants use for petti- 
coats, she exclaimed softly Kitty's praises. 
**I know I shouldn't make personal re- 
marks, but Mrs. Baldry is lovely. She 
has three circles round her neck. I Ve 
only two." It was a touching betrayal 
that she possessed that intimate knowl- 
edge of her own person which comes to 
women who have been loved. I could not 
for the life of me have told you how many 
circles there were round my neck. Plainly 
discontented with herself in the midst of 
all this fineness, she said diffidently, 
** Please, I would like to do my hair.'' So 
I pulled the arm-chair up to the dressing- 
table, and leaned on its back while she, 
sitting shyly on its very edge, unpinned her 
two long braids, so thick, so dull. 
**You 've lovely hair," I said. 



154 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

**I used to have nice hair/' she mourned, 
^*but these last few years I 've let myself 
go.'* She made half-hearted attempts to 
smooth the straggling tendrils on her 
temples, but presently laid down her brush 
and cjicked her tongue against her teeth. 
**I hope that man 's not worrying Chris," 
she said. 

There was no reassurance ready, so I 
went to the other side of the room to put 
her hat down on a chair, and stayed for 
a moment to pat its plumes and wonder 
if nothing could be done with it. But it 
was, as surgeons say, an inoperable case. 
So I just gloomed at it and wished I had 
not let this doctor interpose his plumpness 
between Chris and Margaret, who since 
that afternoon seemed to me as not only 
a woman whom it was good to love, but, 
as a patron saint must appear to a 
Catholic, as an intercessory being whose 
kindliness could be daunted only by some 



ft 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 155 

special and incredibly malicious decision of 
the Supreme Force. I was standing with 
eyes closed and my hands abstractedly 
stroking the hat that was the emblem of 
her martyrdom, and I was thinking of her 
in a way that was a prayer to her, when I 
heard her sharp cry. That she, whose es- 
sence was a patient silence, should cry out 
sharply, startled me strangely. I turned 
quickly. 

She was standing up, and in her hand 
she held the photograph of Oliver that I 
keep on my dressing-table. It is his last 
photograph, the one taken just a week be- 
fore he died. 

**Who is thisT' she asked. 

**The only child Chris ever had. He 
died five years ago." 

V*Five years ago?" 

Why did it matter so? 

*^Yes,"Isaid. 

*'Ee died five years ago, my Dick." 



156 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

Her eyes grew great. * * How old was he T ' 

^^Just two/' 

**My Dick was two.'' We both were 
breathing hard. * * Why did he die ! " 

**We never knew. He was the loveliest 
boy, but delicate from his birth. At the 
end he just faded away, with the merest 
cold." 

^ ^ So did my Dick — a chill. We thought 
he would be up and about the next day, 
and he just — " 

Her awful gesture of regret was sud- 
denly paralyzed. She seemed to be fight- 
ing her way to a discovery. 

^'It 's — it 's as if," she stammered, 
*^they each had half a life." 

I felt the usual instinct to treat her as 
though she were ill, because it was evi- 
dent that she was sustained by a mystic 
interpretation of life. But she had al- 
ready taught me something, so I stood 
aside while she fell on her knees, and 
wondered why she did not look at the 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 157 

child's photograph, but pressed it to her 
bosom, as though to stanch a wound. I 
thought, as I have often thought before, 
that the childless have the greatest joy in 
children, for to us they are just slips of 
immaturity lovelier than the flowers and 
with the power over the heart, but to 
mothers they are fleshly cables binding one 
down to such profundities of feeling as the 
awful agony that now possessed her. For 
although I knew I would have accepted it 
with rapture because it was the result of 
intimacy with Chris, its awfulness ap- 
palled me. Not only did it make my body 
hurt with sympathy; it shook the ground 
beneath my feet. For that her serenity, 
which a moment before had seemed as 
steady as the earth and as all-enveloping 
as the sky, should be so utterly dispelled 
made me aware that I had of late been 
underestimating the cruelty of the order 
of things. Lovers are frustrated; chil- 
dren are not begotten that should have had 



158 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

the loveliest life ; the pale usurpers of their 
birth die young. Such a world will not 
suffer magic circles to endure. 

The parlor-maid knocked at the door. 

*^Mrs. Baldry and Dr. Anderson are 
waiting in the drawing-room, ma 'am. ' ' 

Margaret reassumed her majesty, and 
put her white face close to the glass as she 
pinned up her braids. 

**I knew there was a something,'' she 
moaned, and set the hair-pins all awry. 
More she could not say, though I clung to 
her and begged her; but the slow gesture 
with which, as we were about to leave the 
room, she laid her hand across the child's 
photograph somehow convinced me that we 
were not to be victorious. 

When we went into the drawing-room 
we found Dr. Anderson, plump and ex- 
pository, balancing himself on the balls of 
his feet on the hearth-rug and enjoying the 
caress of the fire on his calves, while Kitty, 
showing against the dark frame of her oak 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 159 

chair like a white rosebud that was still too 
innocent to bloom, listened with that slight 
reservation of the attention customary in 
beautiful women. 

*^A complete case of amnesia,*' he was 
saying as Margaret, white-lipped, yet less 
shy than I had ever seen her, went to a 
seat by the window, and I sank down on 
the sofa. *'His unconscious self is refus- 
ing to let him resume his relations with 
his normal life, and so we get this loss of 
memory. ' ' 

*'I Ve always said,'' declared Kitty, 
with an air of good sense, ^Hhat if he 
would make an effort — " 

** Effort!" He jerked his round head 
about. *'The mental life that can be con- 
trolled by effort isn't the mental life that 
matters. You 've been stuffed up when 
you were young with talk about a thing 
called self-control, a sort of barmaid of 
the soul that says, ^Time 's up, gentle- 
men,' and *Here, you 've had enough.' 



160 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

There 's no such thing. There 's a deep 
self in one, the essential self, that has its 
wishes. And if those wishes are sup- 
pressed by the superficial self, — the self 
that makes, as you say, efforts, and usually 
makes them with the sole idea of putting up 
a good show before the neighbors, — it takes 
its revenge. Into the house of conduct 
erected by the superficial self it sends an 
obsession, which does n't, owing to a twist 
that the superficial self, which is n't candid, 
gives it, seem to bear any relation to the 
suppressed wish. A man who really wants 
to leave his wife develops a hatred for 
pickled cabbage which may find vent in 
performances that lead straight to the 
asylum. But that 's all technical,'' he 
finished bluffly. **My business to under- 
stand it, not yours. The point is, Mr. 
Baldry's obsession is that he can't remem- 
ber the latter years of his life. Well," — 
his winking blue eyes drew us all into a 
community we hardly felt, — **what 's tibe 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 161 

suppressed wish of which it 's the mani- 
festation?'' 

**He wished for nothing/' said Kitty. 
**He was fond of us, and he had a lot of 
money. ' ' 

*^Ah, but he did!" countered the doctor, 
gleefully. He seemed to be enjoying it 
all. * * Quite obviously he has forgotten his 
life here because he is discontented with it. 
What clearer proof could you need than 
the fact you were just telling me when 
these ladies came in — that the reason the 
War Office didn't wire to you when he 
was wounded was that he had forgotten 
to register his address? Don't you see 
what that means ? ' ' 

< < Forgetf ulness, ' ' shrugged Kitty. * * He 
isn't businesslike." She had always 
nourished a doubt as to whether Chris was 
really, as she put it, practical, and his in- 
come and his international reputation 
weighed nothing as against his evident in- 
ability to pick up pieces at sales. 



162 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

*^One forgets only those things that one 
wants to forget. It 's our business to find 
out why he wanted to forget this life. ' ' 

**He can remember quite well when he 
is hypnotized/^ she said obstructively. 
She had quite ceased to glow. 

*'0h, hypnotism 's a silly trick. It re- 
leases the memory of a dissociated person- 
ality which can't be related — not possibly 
in such an obstinate case as this — to the 
waking personality. I '11 do it by talking 
to him. Getting him to tell his dreams." 
He beamed at the prospect. **But you — it 
would be such a help if you would give me 
any clue to this discontent." 

**I tell you," said Kitty, **he was not dis- 
contented till he went mad. ' ' 

He caught the glint of her rising temper. 

**Ah," he said, ** madness is an indict- 
ment not of the people one lives with, only 
of the high gods. If there was anything, 
it 's evident that it was not your fault. ' ' A 
smile sugared it, and knowing that where 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 163 

he had to flatter his dissecting hand had 
not an easy task, he turned to me, whose 
general appearance suggests that flattery- 
is not part of my daily diet. **You, Miss 
Baldry, you Ve known him longest." 

** Nothing and everything was wrong," 
I said at last. **I 've always felt it." A 
sharp movement of Kitty's body confirmed 
my deep, old suspicion that she hated me. 

He went back further than I expected. 

**His relations with his father and 
mother, now?" 

**His father was old when he was born, 
and always was a little jealous of him. 
His mother was not his sort. She wanted 
a stupid son who would have been satisfied 
with shooting." 

He laid down a remark very softly, like 
a hunter setting a snare. 

**He turned, then, to sex with a peculiar 
need." 

It was Margaret who spoke, shuffling her 
feet awkwardly under her chair. 



164 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

**Yes, he was always dependent." 

We gaped at her who said this of our 
splendid Chris, and I saw that she was 
not as she had been. There was a direct- 
ness of speech, a straight stare, that was 
for her a frenzy. * ^Doctor,'' she said, her 
mild voice roughened, **what 's the use 
of talking? You can't cure him," — she 
caught her lower lip with her teeth and 
fought back from the brink of tears, — 
**make him happy, I mean. All you can 
do is to make him ordinary. ' ' 

**I grant you that 's all I do," he said. 
It queerly seemed as though he was ex- 
periencing the relief one feels on meeting 
an intellectual equal. * * It 's my profession 
to bring people from various outlying dis- 
tricts of the mind to the normal. There 
seems to be a general feeling it 's the place 
where they ought to be. Sometimes I 
don't see the urgency myself." 

She continued without joy : 

'*I know how you could bring him back 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 165 

— a memory so strong that it would recall 
everything else in spite of his discontent. '' 

The little man had lost in a moment his 
glib assurance, his knowingness about the 
pathways of the soul. 

* * Well, I 'm willing to learn. ' ' 

** Remind him of the boy,'' said Mar- 
garet. 

The doctor ceased suddenly to balance 
on the balls of his feet. 

** What boy?" 

*^ They had a boy." 

He looked at Kitty. 

^^You told me nothing of this!" 

*^I didn't think it mattered," she an- 
swered, and shivered and looked cold, as 
she always did at the memory of her 
unique contact with death. **He died five 
years ago." 

He dropped his head back, stared at the 
cornice, and said with the soft malignity 
of a clever person dealing with the slow- 
witted. 



166 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

** These subtle discontents are often the 
most difficult to deal with.'^ Sharply he 
turned to Margaret. *^How would you 
remind himf 

* * Take him something the boy wore, some 
toy he played with.'' 

Their eyes met wisely. 

**It would have to be you that did it.'' 

Her face assented. 

Kitty said : 

**I don't understand. How does it mat- 
ter so much?" She repeated it twice be- 
fore she broke the silence that Margaret's 
wisdom had brought down on us. Then 
Dr. Anderson, rattling the keys in his 
trousers-pockets and swelling red and per- 
turbed, answered : 

**I don't know, but it does." 

Kitty's voice soared in satisfaction. 

**0h, then it 's very simple. Mrs. Grey 
can do it now. Jenny, take Mrs. Grey up 
to the nursery. There are lots of things 
up there." 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 167 

Margaret made no movement, but con- 
tinued to sit with her heavy boots resting 
on the edge of their soles. Dr. Anderson 
searched Kitty ^s face, exclaimed, *^0h, 
well!'' and flung himself into an arm-chair 
so suddenly that the springs spoke. Mar- 
garet smiled at that and turned to me, 
**Yes, take me to the nursery, please." 
Yet as I walked beside her up the stairs 
I knew this compliance was not the indi- 
cation of any melting of this new steely 
sternness. The very breathing that I 
heard as I knelt beside her at the nursery 
door and eased the disused lock seemed 
to come from a different and a harsher 
body than had been hers before. I did not 
wonder that she was feeling bleak, since 
in a few moments she was to go out and 
say the words that would end all her hap- 
piness, that would destroy all the gifts 
her generosity had so difficultly amassed. 
Well, that is the kind of thing one has to 
do in this life. 



168 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

But hardly had the door opened and dis- 
closed the empty, sunny spaces swimming 
with motes before her old sweetness flow- 
ered again. She moved forward slowly, 
tremulous and responsive and pleased, as 
though the room's loveliness was a gift to 
her. She stretched out her hands to the 
clear sapphire walls and the bright fresco 
of birds and animals with a young delight. 
So, I thought, might a bride go about the 
house her husband secretly prepared for 
her. Yet when she reached the hearth and 
stood with her hands behind her on the 
fireguard, looking about her at all the ex- 
quisite devices of our nursery to rivet 
health and amusement on our reluctant 
little visitor, it was so apparent that she 
was a mother that I could not imagine how 
it was that I had not always known it. It 
has sometimes happened that painters who 
have kept close enough to earth to see a 
heavenly vision have made pictures of the 
assumption of the Blessed Virgin which do 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 169 

indeed show women who could bring God 
into the world by the passion of their 
motherhood. *^Let there be life," their 
suspended bodies seem to cry out to the 
universe about them, and the very clouds 
under their feet change into cherubim. 
As Margaret stood there, her hands 
pressed palm to palm beneath her chin and 
a blind smile on her face, she looked even 
so. 

**0h, the fine room!'' she cried. *^But 
where 's his little cotT' 

'^ It is n't here. This is the day nursery. 
The night nursery we didn't keep. It is 
just bedroom now." 

Her eyes shone at the thought of the 
cockered childhood this had been. 

**I couldn't afford to have two nurser- 
ies. It makes all the difference to the wee 
things." She hung above me for a little 
as I opened the ottoman and rummaged 
among Oliver's clothes. **Ah, the lovely 
little frocks! Did she make them? Ah, 



170 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

well, she 'd hardly have the time, with 

this great house to see to. But I don't 

care much for baby frocks. The babies 

themselves are none the happier for them. 

It 's all show.'' She went over to the 

rocking-horse and gave a ghostly child a 

ride. For long she hummed a tuneless 

song into the sunshine and retreated far 

away into some maternal dream. *^He 

was too young for this," she said. **His 

daddy must have given him it. I knew it. 

Men always give them presents above 

their age, they 're in such a hurry for 

them to grow up. We like them to take 

their time, the loves. But where 's his 

engine? Didn't he love puffer-trains? 

Of course he never saw them. You 're 

so far from the railway station. What a 

pity! He 'd have loved them so. Dick 

was so happy when I stopped his pram on 

the railway-bridge on my way back from 

the shops, and he could sit up and see the 

puffers going by." Her distress that 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 171 

Oliver had missed this humble pleasure 
darkened her for a minute. **Why did 
he die! You didn't overtax his brain? 
He wasn't taught his letters too soonT' 

^^Oh, no/' I said. I couldn't find the 
clothes I wanted. *^The only thing that 
taxed his little brain was the prayers his 
Scotch nurse taught him, and he didn't 
bother much over them. He would say, 
* Jesus, tender leopard,' instead of * Jesus, 
tender shepherd,' as if he liked it better." 

**Did you ever! The things they say! 
He 'd a Scotch nurse. They say they 're 
very good. I 've read in the papers the 
Queen of Spain has one." She had gone 
back to the hearth again, and was playing 
with the toys on the mantelpiece. It was 
odd that she showed no interest in my 
search for the most memorable garment. 
A vivacity which played above her tear- 
wet strength, like a ball of St. Elmo's 
fire on the mast of a stout ship, made me 
realize she still was strange. *^The toys 



172 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

he had! His nurse didn't let him have 
them all at once. She held him up and 
said, *Baby, you must choose !' and he said, 
* Teddy, please, Nanny,' and wagged his 
head at every word.'' 

I had laid my hand on them at last. I 
wished, in the strangest way, that I had 
not. Yet of course it had to be. 

''That 's just what he did do," I said. 

As she felt the fine kid-skin of the 
clockwork dog, her face began to twitch. 

''I thought perhaps my baby had left me 
because I had so little to give him. But 
if a baby could leave all this ! ' ' She cried 
flatly, as though constant repetition in the 
night had made it as instinctive a reaction 
to suffering as a moan, ''I want a child! 
I want a child!" Her arms invoked the 
wasted life that had been squandered in 
this room. *'It 's all gone so wrong," 
she fretted, and her voice dropped to a 
solemn whisper. ''They each had only 
half a life." 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 173 

I had to steady her. She could not go 
to Chris and shock him not only by her 
news, but also by her agony. I rose and 
took her the things I had found in the 
ottoman and the toy cupboard. 

^^I think these are the best things to 
take. This is one of the blue jerseys he 
used to wear. This is the red ball he and 
his father used to play with on the lawn." 

Her hard hunger for the child that was 
not melted into a tenderness for the child 
that had been. She looked broodingly at 
what I carried, then laid a kind hand on 
my arm. 

**You Ve chosen the very things he will 
remember. Oh, you poor girl!'' 

I found that from her I could accept 
even pity. 

She nursed the jersey and the ball, 
changed them from arm to arm, and held 
them to her face. 

**I think I know the kind of boy he was 
— a man from the first.'' She kissed 



174 THE RETUHN OF THE SOLDIER 

them, folded up the jersey, and neatly set 
the ball upon it on the ottoman, and re- 
garded them with tears. ^* There, put 
them back. That ^s all I wanted them for. 
All I came up here for." 

I stared. 

**To get Chris's boy," she moaned. 
**You thought I meant to take them out 
to Chris?" She wrung her hands; her 
weak voice quavered at the sternness of 
her resolution. * * How can I T ' 

I grasped her hands. 

**Why should you bring him back?" I 
said. I might have known there was de- 
liverance in her yet. 

Her slow mind gathered speed. 

* ^ Either I never should have come, ' ' she 
pleaded, * ^ or you should let him be. ' ' She 
was arguing not with me, but with the 
whole hostile, reasonable world. **Mind 
you, I wasn't sure if I ought to come the 
second time, seeing we both were married 
and that. I prayed and read the Bible, 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 175 

but I couldn't get any help. You don't 
notice how little there is in the Bible 
really till you go to it for help. But 
I Ve lived a hard life and I Ve always 
done my best for William, and I know 
nothing in the world matters so much 
as happiness. If anybody 's happy, you 
ought to let them be. So I came again. 
Let him be. If you knew how happy he 
was just pottering round the garden. 
Men do love a garden. He could just go 
on. It can go on so easily." But there 
was a shade of doubt in her voice ; she was 
pleading not only with me, but with fate. 
*^You wouldn't let them take him away 
to the asylum. You wouldn't stop me 
coming. The other one might, but you 'd 
see she didn't. Oh, do just let him be! 
**Put it like this." She made such ex- 
planatory gestures as I have seen cabmen 
make over their saucers of tea round a 
shelter. **If my boy had been a cripple, — 
he wasn't; he had the loveliest limbs, — 



176 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

and tlie doctors had said to me, *We '11 
straighten your boy's legs for you, but he 
will be in pain all the rest of his life, ' I 'd 
not have let them touch him. 

**I seemed to have to tell them that I 
knew a way. I suppose it would have 
been sly to sit there and not tell them. 
I told them, anyhow. But, oh, I can't do 
it! Go out and put an end to the poor 
love's happiness. After the time he 's 
had, the war and all. And then he '11 
have to go back there ! I can 't ! I can 't ! " 

I felt an ecstatic sense of ease. Every- 
thing was going to be right. Chris was 
to live in the interminable enjoyment of 
his youth and love. There was to be a 
finality about his happiness which usually 
belongs only to loss and calamity; he was 
to be as happy as a ring cast into the sea 
is lost, as a man whose coffin has lain for 
centuries beneath the sod is dead. Yet 
Margaret continued to say, and irritated 




'1 oughtn't to do it, ought I?' 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 177 

me by the implication that the matter was 
not settled: 

^^I oughtn't to do it, ought IV 
**0f course not! Of course not!*' I 
cried heartily, but the attention died in 
her eyes. She stared over my shoulder 
at the open door, where Kitty stood. 

The poise of her head had lost its pride, 
the shadows under her eyes were black 
like the marks of blows, and all her love- 
liness was diverted to the expression of 
grief. She held in her arms her Chinese 
sleeve dog, a once-prized pet that had 
fallen from favor and was now only to be 
met whining upward for a little love at 
every passer in the corridors, and it 
sprawled leaf-brown across her white 
frock, wriggling for joy at the unaccus- 
tomed embrace. That she should at last 
have stooped to lift the lonely little dog 
was a sign of her deep unhappiness. Why 
she had come up I do not know, nor why 
her face puckered with tears as she looked 



178 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

in on us. It was not that she had the 
slightest intimation of our decision, for 
she could not have conceived that we could 
follow any course but that which was 
obviously to her advantage. It was simply 
that she hated to see this strange, ugly 
woman moving about among her things. 
She swallowed her tears and passed on, 
to drift, like a dog, about the corridors. 
Now, why did Kitty, who was the 
falsest thing on earth, who was in tune 
with every kind of falsity, by merely suf- 
fering somehow remind us of reality? 
Why did her tears reveal to me what I 
had learned long ago, but had forgotten 
in my frenzied love, that there is a draft 
that we must drink or not be fully human? 
I knew that one must know the truth. 
I knew quite well that when one is adult 
one must raise to one's lips the wine of 
the truth, heedless that it is not sweet 
like milk, but draws the mouth with its 
strength, and celebrate communion with 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 179 

reality, or else walk forever queer and 
small like a dwarf. Thirst for this sacra- 
ment had made Chris strike away the cup 
of lies about life that Kitty's white hands 
held to him and turn to Margaret with 
this vast trustful gesture of his loss of 
memory. And helped by me, she had for- 
gotten that it is the first concern of love 
to safeguard the dignity of the beloved, so 
that neither God in his skies nor the boy 
peering through the hedge should find in 
all time one possibility for contempt, and 
had handed him the trivial toy of happi- 
ness. We had been utterly negligent of 
his future, blasphemously careless of the 
divine essential of his soul. For if we left 
him in his magic circle there would come 
a time when his delusion turned to a 
senile idiocy; when his joy at the sight 
of Margaret disgusted the flesh because 
his smiling mouth was slack with age; 
when one's eyes no longer followed him 
caressingly as he went down to look for 



180 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

the first primroses in the wood, but flitted 
here and there defensively to see that no- 
body was noticing the doddering old man. 
Gamekeepers would chat kindly with 
him, and tap their foreheads as they 
passed through the copse; callers would 
be tactful and dangle bright talk before 
him. He who was as a flag flying from 
our tower would become a queer-shaped 
patch of eccentricity on the country-side, 
the full-mannered music of his being 
would become a witless piping in the 
bushes. He would not be quite a man. 

I did not know how I could pierce 
Margaret's simplicity with this last cruel 
subtlety, and turned to her, stammering. 
But she said: 

**Give me the jersey and the ball.'' 

The rebellion had gone from her eyes, 
and they were again the seat of all gentle 
wisdom. 

**The truth 's the truth," she said, **and 
he must know it." 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 181 

I looked up at her, gasping, yet not 
truly amazed; for I had always known 
she could not leave her throne of right- 
eousness for long, and she repeated, * ' The 
truth 's the truth, *' smiling sadly at the 
strange order of this earth. 

We kissed not as women, but as lovers 
do; I think we each embraced that part 
of Chris the other had absorbed by her 
love. She took the jersey and the ball, 
and clasped them as though they were a 
child. When she got to the door she 
stopped and leaned against the lintel. Her 
head fell back ; her eyes closed ; her mouth 
was contorted as though she swallowed 
bitter drink. 

I lay face downward on the ottoman 
and presently heard her poor boots go 
creaking down the corridors. Through 
the feeling of doom that filled the room 
as tangibly as a scent I stretched out to 
the thought of Chris. In the deep daze 
of devotion which followed recollection of 



182 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

the fair down on his cheek, the skin burned 
brown to the rim of his gray eyes, the 
harsh and diffident masculinity of him, I 
found comfort in remembering that there 
was a physical gallantry about him which 
would still, even when the worst had 
happened, leap sometimes to the joy of 
life. Always, to the very end, when the 
sun shone on his face or his horse took his 
fences well, he would screw up his eyes 
and smile that little stiff-lipped smile. I 
nursed a feeble glow at that. **We must 
ride a lot,'' I planned. And then Kitty's 
heels tapped on the polished floor, and her 
skirts swished as she sat down in the arm- 
chair, and I was distressed by the sense, 
more tiresome than a flickering light, of 
some one fretting. 

She said: 

**I wish she would hurry up. She 's 
got to do it sooner or later." 

My spirit was asleep in horror. Out 
there Margaret was breaking his heart 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 183 

and hers, using words like a hammer, 
looking wise, doing it so well. 

** Are n't they coming back?" asked 
Kitty. **I wish you 'd look." 

There was nothing in the garden; only 
a column of birds swinging across the 
lake of green light that lay before the 
sunset. 

A long time after Kitty spoke once 
more: 

^* Jenny, do look again.'' 

There had fallen a twilight which was 
a wistfulness of the earth. Under the 
cedar-boughs I dimly saw a figure mother- 
ing something in her arms. Almost had 
she dissolved into the shadows ; in another 
moment the night would have her. With 
his back turned on this fading unhappiness 
Chris walked across the lawn. He was 
looking up under his brows at the over- 
arching house as though it were a hated 
place to which, against all his hopes, busi- 
ness had forced him to return. He 



184 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 

stepped aside to avoid a patch of bright- 
ness cast by a lighted window on the 
grass ; lights in our house were worse than 
darkness, affection worse than hate else- 
where. He wore a dreadful, decent smile ; 
I knew how his voice would resolutely lift 
in greeting us. He walked not loose- 
limbed like a boy, as he had done that very 
afternoon, but with the soldier's hard 
tread upon the heel. It recalled to me 
that, bad as we were, we were yet not the 
worst circumstance of his return. When 
we had lifted the yoke of our embraces 
from his shoulders he would go back to 
that flooded trench in Flanders, under that 
sky more full of flying death than clouds, 
to that No-Man 's-Land where bullets fall 
like rain on the rotting faces of the dead. 

** Jenny, aren't they there T' Kitty 
asked again. 

^^They 're both there." 

**Is he coming back?" 

*-*He 's coming back." 



THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER 185 

** Jenny! Jenny! How does he lookl" 

*^0h/^ — how could I say it? — ** every 
inch a soldier/' 

She crept behind me to the window, 
peered over my shoulder and saw. 

I heard her suck in her breath with 
satisfaction. 

**He 's cured!" she whispered slowly. 
^^He 's cured!'' 



THE END 













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